Old Time Elevator: 1884 Mill and Elevator Remain in Use

In 1884, W. L. Mathews built a small mill and elevator at Marlette, MI along the Port Huron and Northwestern Railway. According to the History of the Township and Village of Marlette, Michigan, 1854-1956, Mathews “started in a small way” but gradually enlarged his business. The September 1893 Sanborn Insurance map shows several of Mathews’ buildings, including a brick flour mill with a capacity of 100 bushels a day. The mill was powered by steam from water heated with wood and coal and distributed with a 187-gallon-per-minute rotary pump. Water was stored in a stone cistern next to the pump house.

Mathews had a fire in 1894, but the brick mill survived, though some of the beams in the head house were charred. The April 1900 Sanborn map shows the same brick mill, owned by the Excelsior Roller Mills, William L. Mathews Proprietor, Manufacturer of Flour Corn Meal and Feed. Again, steam provided heat and power. The last available Sanborn map of May 1909 indicates that Mathews Milling & Elevator Company had split from Excelsior Roller Mills, but retained the brick flour mill. Wm. Mathews died on July 30, 1901, but his son Walter continued to run the business until 1917 when the newly formed Marlette Farmers Co-Operative Elevator Company bought the Mathews’ brick mill.

1890 Mill Fire

H. W. Wilson started his business, H. W. Wilson Flour Mill & Elevator, on the other side of Main Street in 1889. In December 1890, his mill caught fire. The engine building was brick, but the mill was wood with metal siding. The mill burned down, but the siding helped to protect the other buildings, including the grain elevator. The 1909 Sanborn map shows that Wilson rebuilt his facility. The only documentation after that map is a note in the history book that the Marlette Farmers bought his 15,000-bushel, steam-powered elevator in 1917.

At this point, the Marlette farmers owned the Mathews brick mill and Wilson’s elevator, and they used both until the farmers sold to Southern Thumb Co-Operative in 1995. The current owner, Michigan Agricultural Commodities (MAC), acquired the business in 1997.

For a while, the mill became the soybean plant. The wooden stairs to the second floor are dished from the footprints of the ladies who climbed them to work at their bean sorter stations.

Chuck Kunisch, safety director for MAC who started to work at the Marlette facility in 2000, describes the sorting process. “The ladies would sit all day at their sorters, with the navy beans being fed onto a belt that the treadle moved. As the beans went down the belt, the ladies picked out the cull beans. It was a mind-numbing job. When we remodeled the brick plant for food-grade soybeans, the treadles were gone but the pipes to feed them were there, as were the holes in the floor where pipes hooked onto the sorters to take the good beans away. The ladies were paid by the hundredweight they picked each day. Now the job is all done with optical sorters.”

In the 1950s, the Marlette farmers added eight concrete silos of 6,000 bushels each. Kunisch says that farmer members believed there wasn’t enough grain in the county to fill them. “Now we can fill all of them in less than a day, even with filling them with identity-preserved specialty beans.”

Kunisch shared more of his memories and those of another long-time employee. “Two guys were pushing cars with the 990 railroad engine to the north mill (the former Wilson elevator, now painted blue) and lost radio communication. The first car jumped the stops and ended up in the middle of Highway M-53.” Dick Crothers, who worked at the Marlette facility for nearly 50 years, recalls, that he and another man worked 12-hour night shifts beginning on the opening day of pheasant season in mid-October, when they started to revive wet corn. Two other men worked the day shift. They ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no let up until around Valentine’s Day. They also loaded 100-pound bags on rail cars manually with no equipment. “You would have a hard time finding anyone that could pick up a 100-pound bag, much less load the bag on a rail car by hand.”

Mike Metzer, who worked at the Marlette facility for many years and whose father, Larry Metzer, managed it for at least 30 years, shared a couple of his own recollections. Before the days of OSHA, they loaded coal cars with wheat at the north mill (the blue elevator). After they filled the open hoppers, they had to put a tarp on the top of each car and lace it down so it didn’t blow off in transit. They also loaded box cars with dry beans that had been processed in the bean plant. They boarded up the doors, shot the beans in over the planking, and while the beans were pouring in, a man was inside the car shoveling around the beans to fill the car evenly.