Yes, some Canadian grain did make it to the US during your time period. Most of it via lake boat to places like Buffalo. Canadian imports were often driven by shortages of US grain as a result of drou

Reference to the Pennick & Ford plant in Cedar Rapids brings back a memory from the early 70's. The P&F plant used an unusual machine to unload boxcars, it was a car rocker, but nothing like the car s

Boxcars used for bagged flour loading were most often "lined" with with heavy craft paper, this was for two principal reasons, 1. sanitary - it kept the flour bags cleaner, 2, to reduce damage to the

A number of years ago, I was in a Menard;s store (Wisc. based home improvement chain similar to Lowe's Home Depot) and they were selling a product they called "car siding" which appeared to be just th

There were/are lots of liquid grain fumigants applied as you describe,some brand names were Weevil-Cide, Phostoxin and many others. Application of these fumigants was more common many decades ago. Som

The Buffalo Creek cars were pretty common in Minnespta at least thru the mid 70s. A lot of wheat moved by lake boats from Duluth Superior to Buffalo. Some years they were not able to get it all moved

International Milling was a Minneapolis based flour milling giant (Robin Hood Flour) with Mills and terminal elevators spread around the US and Canada, the company morphed into International Multifood

A lot of grain was sold "in the car" but it was not at all like roller lumber, where circuitous routing was used to lengthen the time of the trip to permit extra time to market the load. In the case o