Prairie Sentinels – Nanton Alberta
The Canadian Grain Elevator Discovery Centre, a museum located in Nanton Alberta, showcases the once common prairie sentinel. These buildings, at one time, could be found all across the west – near every town in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, it seemed, had one or more – but today few remain. Included in that short list of survivors are the three grain elevators seen here (well, technically four) which sit alongside the roadbed of an abandoned railway line not from the town’s core.
The first elevator is actually comprised of two buildings placed side by side, and is known as a twin. The one on the right, when looking at it from the train track side, dates from 1927. It’s the smaller of the two buildings, by a fraction. The second elevator was constructed beside it in 1936. Original public domain image from Flickr