Last Elva - a photo on Flickriver

Last Elva

When I saw the old Lake of the Woods elevator in Elva in late February this year, they had already started to strip it. A company had bought it and was going to strip it for its beautiful old tin cladding and worn wood. Given that the Lake of the Woods elevator at Elva was the oldest elevator still standing in Canada (it was built in 1897), I have mixed feeling about this. Many old elevators are simply demolished, so it was a better fate than that, but it was such a beautiful old elevator that I wished it could be saved and preserved. The thing is, though, that the elevators present a hazard to the towns they are in - they can catch fire when struck by lightning, and then have the potential collapse onto nearby electrical lines. When they are so far decayed as this one was, there is really nothing that can be done with them. Farmers who buy relatively intact elevators can keep them working for grain cleaning and storage, but there's a lot of effort involved and entropy works hard against them. Even though I once read about a student's graduate school project based on how to repurpose old elevators for housing, that takes a lot of work (they are full of old grain dust, mouse and pigeon droppings, shaped in a way that makes them hard to repurpose for living space and they tend to be located in places where there isn't a lot of need for new housing). Anyway, long story short - as I walked around on a silent and frigid day photographing this beauty and the United Grain Growers elevator right next to her - I felt a real poignancy and sadness. I photographed her back in 2017 and I knew this would be the last time I'd see her and I wanted to capture her, despite her half-stripped state, as the proud beauty that she was.

And then, less than 6 weeks later, something even worse happened - she burned to the ground. A stray spark was all it took.

So many of my favourite elevators (lightning, demolition, storm damage) are gone now but I am so grateful that I got to see them, when they still stood proudly against the Prairie sky, and photographed them on one of their last days.

Elva, Manitoba, Canada.

I wrote a blog post about this trip in February/March 2022. If you'd like to see some behinds the scene shots, video and read some stories about how I shot these images, take a look.

I love photographing on the Canadian Prairies and I've been travelling there to do so since 2013. If you'd like to see my other Prairie images, feel free to take a look at the album.

Website | Blog | Instagram

Taken on: February 28, 2022

Tags:

Canada

Elva

Manitoba

Prairies

Snow

Winter « less

Sets appears in: • Grain Elevators of the Prairies and Great Plains • Canadian Prairies in Winter more » • Canadian Prairies • Winter Minimalism « less

Groups appears in: • inscapes

Camera: Nikon Z 7, f/8.0, 1/320 sec, 14mm, ISO 64 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon Z 7
Lens:	NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S
Aperture:	f/8.0
Exposure Time:	0.003 sec (1/320)
Focal Length:	14mm
ISO:	64
Exposure Bias:	+1 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Scene Capture Type:	Portrait
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 12.0.1 (Windows)
Show full info

Stats: 8,217 views / 24 comments