The Farmers’ Cooperative Grain Elevator: Richmond, Kansas, 1936

In a plains town, the elevator was the skyline.

Arthur Rothstein photographed Richmond, Kansas’s farmers’ cooperative grain elevator in May 1936 — owned by the farmers themselves, standing over the tracks, waiting for the wheat the whole county’s year depended on.

Most towns had one building you could see for miles. It was usually this one: the place where the harvest became income, and where a cooperative of neighbors pooled the crop that no single farm could have marketed alone.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USF34-004270-D

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