A Logging Train Wreck

Train wrecks seem to have held quite a fascination for people back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with plenty of gawkers showing up, some bringing their cameras. Someone took the time to record at least three photographs of this accident involving a logging train. Unfortunately, they didn't record any information on the back of the photographs. So about the only information that I can glean from from these is that the locomotive was the No. 4.

The tech geek in me finds the underside of the locomotive, especially how the brakes linkage was designed, quite fascinating; one almost never gets to see this view of a steam locomotive. And note that the two center drivers didn't have flanges.

Updike Grain Co.

This old photograph, produced by the "Lake View Studio" (where that was, I have no clue), of an Updike Grain Company elevator sent me on a very unexpected journey, exploring some of the fierce legal and political battles brought on by federal government meddling in the markets that wracked the grain farming industry at the time of the Great Depression.

The Updike Grain Co. was a large grain storage and trading company, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, and which operated grain elevators throughout the mid-west. Nelson Blackwell Updike (b. Dec. 2, 1871 Pennington N.J.) first bought a grain elevator in Eldorado Neb. shortly after his marriage in 1895. With the success of that elevator, he began to purchase more country elevators, and built terminal elevators in Omaha. He incorporated the Updike Grain Corp. in Omaha in 1899, and became a member of the Chicago Board of Trade's grain exchange in 1900. In 1903 Updike helped found the Omaha Grain Exchange with several other local grain company owners.

When the Union Pacific Railroad tried to use a tariff rule loophole to deny payment for grain storage to Updike and several other companies, Updike sued, and the case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judgment was decided on December 4, 1911 in favor of Updike, with Justice Lamar writing the opinion of the court.

Gold Medal Flour signs on the office walls suggest that this was a wheat elevator.
"Gold Medal" was a brand used by Washburn, Crosby Co. before being acquired
by General Mills, who continues to market flour under the brand today.

In the court's decision, an important principle of fair commerce was elucidated: "The carrier cannot pay one shipper for transportation service, and enforce an arbitrary rule which deprives another of compensation for similar service. To receive the benefit of such work by one elevator without making compensation therefore would, in effect, be the involuntary payment by such elevator of a rebate to the railroad company, for it would enable the railroad to receive more net freight on its grain than was received from its competitor located on the railroad's tracks. This cannot be directly done, nor indirectly by means of regulation. A rule apparently fair on its face and reasonable in its terms may, in fact, be unfair and unreasonable if it operates so as to give one an advantage of which another, similarly situated, cannot avail himself."

Nelson B. Updike, from the 1922 edition of the
Official Reference Book, Press Club of Chicago

In 1917, N. B. Updike dissolved the corporation and became the sole owner of Updike Grain Co, and at some point, the company's headquarters were moved to Chicago.


In the 1920s, farmers were hard-hit by wildly fluctuating market prices, driven by commodities speculators. This resulted in Congress passing the Grain Futures Act in 1922. As the nation's economy started to implode in the late 1920s, Congress also passed the Agricultural Marketing Act which established the Federal Farm Board, commissioned to stabilize commodities prices and thus halt the downward spiral of grain prices which threatened to ruin America's farmers. The effort was largely a failure.

In order to take advantage of price subsidies, the Farm Board required farmers to join production cooperatives, and in 1929 established the Farmers National Grain Corp, a quasi-public, government-funded entity described in court documents as an "association of cooperative associations". Rather than building an extensive infrastructure of its own to facilitate national trade in grain by the member cooperatives, FNGC purchased existing companies, including in 1930, the Updike Grain Co. This purchase, allegedly done secretly, brought two important assets to FNGC: its large chain of grain storage elevators like the one shown in our photo, and its seats on the Chicago Board of Trade and the consequent membership in the grain exchange (more on this in a bit).

That same year, the Federal Farm Board and FNGC established the Grain Stabilization Corp. in order to protect farmers from wildly swinging grain prices brought on by speculators and commodities traders. The Board was Pres. Herbert Hoover's method of establishing a means of federal regulation of crop prices. GSC was run by farmers' cooperatives, but fully funded by the Farm Board (meaning the government). To increase farmers' income, the GSC was allowed to buy and sell grain on the open market, with FNGC acting as its broker, and it set out to corner the market on grain, buy up any surpluses, and thus drive up the prices. This created a raft of unintended consequences (some of which are discussed in this article), and by 1933, with the nation deep in the Great Depression, the Farm Board decided that it had helped the farmers as much as it could, and GSC's stockpile of grain was slowly sold off. This was completed by April 29, 1933.

The adversaries of the scheme was The Chicago Board of Trade, which  was described by Rep. Strong in 1932 as "the world's greatest wheat gambling rendezvous." (Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1932). Politics created a fair amount of enmity between the government and Farmer's National and the Chicago Board of Trade's grain exchange. Updike had been a member of the exchange since 1900, and its executives held two board seats, and FNGC used Updike's membership to clear its trades.

But in 1931, the Board of Trade changed its rules to exclude government owned and subsidized concerns, and Updike's membership was suspended. Charges flew that this was the traders' attempt to undermine the coop and price stabilization movements (with stabilization, speculators can't easily manipulate the market and make their huge profits). The Board of Trade decided that for a company to trade on the exchange, it had to have at least two company executives on the board, and they could only be members if they owned stock in their company. Because the two Updike executives no longer owned stock (since it was now a wholly-owned subsidiary of FNGC), they were thrown off the board. The rules by which FNGC was established stipulated that its stock could only be owned by farmers' cooperatives, and not by individuals, so this excluded FNGC from joining the board and the exchange under its own name. Without membership in the exchange, FNGC could not clear trades, and thus could not market its member coops' grain. T

FNGC appealed to the Grain Futures Commission, who sided with FNGC and suspended the Board of Trade's "contract market" designation (some of the legal arguments can be read here and here) in 1932. After more legal maneuvering, and a failed appeal by the Board of Trade to the U.S. Supreme Court, they relented, changed the rules and finally granted FNGC membership in the clearinghouse.

It's hard to determine when the Updike name disappeared. After 1932, it was no longer needed by FNGC to trade on the exchange, but how long it continued to be used at the local level with the various grain elevators is not clear. FNGC consistently lost money (except for the years that it served as broker for the Grain Stabilization Corp.) and it went bankrupt in 1935, but was bailed out and operated by the Farm Credit Administration; the reorganization wiped out $14 million in debt. In late 1937, its grain marketing operations were taken over by its constituent regional cooperatives and as a corporation, it was dissolved by its shareholders in January 1938. The Farm Security Administration subsequently made loans available to farmers so that they could buy shares in their local coops, which then could revive the elevators, many of them former Updike Grain Co. elevators, that had once been operated by the FNGC. In place of FNGC, the National Federation of Grain Cooperatives was formed.

Our House - 7

The height of this house, and the way the flagstones are built up intrigues me, but also doesn't look terribly stable and permanent. A mother, grandmother and little girl pose.

Remembering San Francisco's Big Shakeup

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When San Franciscans went to bed on the night of April 17, 1906 (those who did go to bed - sections of the city teamed with life at night), little did they know that over three thousand would be dead in the morning. When the ground began shaking at 5:12 in the morning, the city which had been largely built with brick and wood crumbled. Powerlines came down at the same time as gas mains burst, and with the water mains also severed, fires raged across the city doing even more damage than the shaking ground had.

Then came those trying to control the fires, but dynamiting countless buildings in it path in hopes of cutting fire breaks, when all they did was create large mounds of wood and debris to fuel the flames. In the end, over 80% of the city was destroyed. It was rebuilt, of course, but rebuilt differently, newer, better, and much of what had once been was lost forever. After the Civil War, the San Francisco earthquake and fire were the first major American disaster to come about in the age of photography, and much of the damage was captured on camera, as with these stereo cards.

Wreck of interior of "Emporium" which collapsed after fire. "This confused mass of fallen and shattered steel beams and bare framework from whih the walls have fallen, roofless and wrecked, was once the largest store in San Francisco, a huge department establishment.... The upper stories were used by the State Supreme Court, but now all that remains in the least intact of the once handsome Parrott Building is the stone front on Market Street....

Post Street, once a busy shopping district, now a scene of desolation. "We are still in the heart of the business section, only a block or two from Market Street near the Call and Chronicle Buildings. No attempt has been made to clear away the wreckage in the street. The roadway is filled from curb to tcurb with bricks that have been shaken down, no so much by the earthquake, as by the repeated flames. Then on a level with the curious spectators is a tangled mass of charred wires, sagged down from their supports. These were the danger-points of the disaster and the origin of most of the fires thatj broke out at once, as the electric currents ignited the escaping gas from bursting mains. Post Street...was becoming a favorite retail shopping district, particularly in the vicinity of Union Scquare, a short distance down the street behind us. The skyscraper inthe background was in process of construction at the time of the disaster and was not injured.

Palace Hotel, undamaged by earthquake, interior burned out. "Less than a mile up Market Street from the ferry, we stop to gaze at the empty shells of these great buildings, once the very center of public life of the gay, cosmopolitan San Francisco. Directly in front stands the windowless, floorless Palace Hotel, the largest and most popular in the city. On the night of April 17th it was crowded to the doors with guests...attending the opera season by the Conried Company of New York. All escaped but with enormous loss, and the flames rapidly devoured all but the brick walls. Next above stands the ten-story Monadnock office building, hardly completed at the time of the disaster and but little dmamaged. Beyond that rises the tallest building in San Francisco, the huge Spreckels Building, better known as the Call, from the newspaper whose offices were located in it. This, too, was completely gutted by fire.

Wrecked Hall of Justice, seen from a street in Chinatown. "Chinatown, that mysterious and fascinating quarter of San Francisco, has vanished. No new Chinatown will probably ever present the same weird, Oriental aspect, nor add the hidden mystery of those vast underground burrows, now for the first time laid bare. The district was bounded approximately by Sacramento, Stockton, Pacific nad Kearney Streets, and we are standing in the heart of it on Washington Street, now filled with heaps of bring and iron beams. Down the street stands the Hall of Justice, with the steel frame of its cupola toppled over on the tower. Part of the ruin was caused by the earthquake, but the ragin fire that swept this district cleaned out the interior. The scorched trees on this side of the building are in Portsmouth Square, bounded nearest us by Kearney Street. This was formerly known as the Plaza, and aobut it stood the original little Mexican settlement of Yerba Buena."

Terrible destruction of City Hall (cost $7,000,000), from Market street. "The magnificent and costly City Hall, the pride of San Francisco, stands about a mile and a half from the Bay, in a small triangular park, called Yerba Buena after the original Mexican settlement northeast of Market Street. Its once stately outlines can with difficulty be traced in the sreck, which less than a minute produced. The destruction here was entirely the work of the earthquake. Nothin in all the ruined city shows more vividly the awful force of the earthquake than this shattered building. On this Larkin Street side the walls were thrown down for several hundred feet, filling the street for two blockes with high piles of brick and cement. Only two blocks away on the left, at Van Ness and Golden Gate Avenues, the fire reached its western limit."

Dynamiting dangerous walls on Market Street after the fire. "By April 21st the fire was practically extinguished and the next day the work of clearing up was begun. first of all Market Street was made passable, and for this work citizens of all classes were pressed into service by the military authorities, who were still the supporters of law and order. But when the debris had been cleared, a great danger still remained in the shattered walls, still standing in the most threatening condition. The dynamiting [of the walls] is being done under the direction of the Building Committee, a body of forty citizens appointed by Mayor Schmitz. Several members of the committee are in this automobile, watching the explosion several hundred feet down the street. This work will have to be done all over the burned district, for most of the ruined walls can be handled only in this way."

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Three Machinists-Steam Punk Before Steam Punk Was Cool

You can almost smell the cutting oil in this photo, feel the spiral cuttings and chips crunch under the soles of your work shoes. There is just something timeless and almost magical about a big industrial-era machine shop. Here was were progress was made. The locomotives, the ships the massive things that made America, they started here. Their bearings and drive rods were carefully and precisely machined here. Now it's all computerized, but then it took smarts and care and patience to hone something remarkable out of a billet of metal. We celebrate an idealized form of steam punk: these fellows lived the real thing!

One of the things I really love about a lot of these old photographs is their clarity: even though this print is fairly small (and appears to have been printed from a damaged glass negative), the optics of the old camera render many wonderful details in this machine shop.

What a cool little oil can!

Someone dropped a spanner down amongst all the metal shavings

The New Farm School

This class photo is quite likely the first to be taken at this farming community school, judging by how new the building looks.

Before Palisade Died

Palisade, Nevada, can't even qualify as a ghost town...there just isn't anything left. The town was built along the route of the Transpacific Railroad, at the east end of Palisade Canyon, and served as an interchange with the Eureka & Paalisade Railroad, and a shipping point serving many local mining and ranching operations.

The 85-mile long, 3-foot narrow-gauge Eureka & Palisade was built between the two townships between 1873 and 1875 in order to connect the silver and lead mines around Eureka with the new Transcontinental Railroad. Like most mining-related narrow-gauge railroads of Nevada, the line's fortunes followed the boom and bust cycle in mining. The road struggled financially, and went through reorganization several times, becoming the Eureka & Palisade Railway, and then Eureka Nevada Railway.

By 1910, mining was on an upswing, and so were the fortunes of the little E&P. Up to 200 tons of ore a day were hauled by the line to Palisade where it was transferred to the Southern Pacific and taken to smelters in Salt Lake City.

The company survived just a bit longer than the Nevada Central, and when it was finally closed in 1938 it was the last narrow-gauge line operating in Nevada. With the railroad's closing, there was no reason for there to be a town at this lonely spot, and it all but disappeared into the weeds.

On the far side of the freight shed can be seen a coach and a couple of locomotives of the narrow-gauge Eureka & Palisade.

One of the original Baldwin 4-4-0 American locomotives from the E&P has survived as the last such wood-burning locomotive in America. It is privately owned by Dan Markoff and is kept in Las Vegas. The locomotive occasionally makes appearances at special events, but this is rare because its boiler is original, and Markoff wants to preserve it that way. Photos from one of those events can be seen here.

Built in 1884, this two-story building served as offices for both the Central Pacific and the Eureka & Palisade/Eureka Nevada
Standard-gauge tracks are on this side of the building, the narrow-gauge tracks are on the far side.

Photos and memories of the town can be seen here.

The site of Palisade, Nevada, as it appears today along the Union Pacific main line.

A Crane at Work

Probably not much of a story here with this small snapshot print, but who doesn't love an old crane, and besides, it is always fun to take an every-day scene from long ago and blow it up and look at the details. Here a crew uses a wonderful old crane.

I'm guessing that this is a gravel crusher setup that they're assembling (or are they disassembling it?).

So what's that guy doing under there (in the crop below)?