The Enid Terminal Grain Elevators Historic District is located in Enid

Enid, Oklahoma

Enid is a city in Garfield County, Oklahoma, United States. In 2010, the population was 49,379, making it the ninth largest city in Oklahoma. It is the county seat of Garfield County. Enid was founded during the opening of the Cherokee Outlet in the Land Run of 1893, and is named after Enid, a...

, Garfield County, Oklahoma

Garfield County, Oklahoma

Garfield County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma named after President James A. Garfield. As of 2010, the population was 60,580. Enid is the county seat and largest city within Garfield County...

 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

 since 2009. The district consists of concrete grain elevator

Grain elevator

A grain elevator is a tower containing a bucket elevator, which scoops up, elevates, and then uses gravity to deposit grain in a silo or other storage facility...

s located between North 10th, North 16th, North Van Buren, and Willow Streets which have dotted the Enid skyline since the 1920s.

History

In 1938, during the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, Enid set a record of 14,185 train loads of wheat. By April 1939, Enid was claiming the title of "Oklahoma’s Queen Wheat City." By 1962, Garfield County's storage capacity was 75 million bushels, becoming the state of Oklahoma's main grain storage and handling center. By 1970, the city claimed the title of Wheat Capital of the United States of America.

The need for grain transportation has led to the continued improvement of Enid's infrastructure. In addition to being a grain storage hub, Enid was a rail hub for the Cherokee Outlet

Cherokee Outlet

The Cherokee Outlet, often mistakenly referred to as the Cherokee Strip, was located in what is now the state of Oklahoma, in the United States. It was a sixty-mile wide strip of land south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border between the 96th and 100th meridians. It was about 225 miles long and in 1891...

. The first elevator built in Enid, the Enid Terminal Elevator, is located next to the Van Buren overpass next to Enid's main rail hub, five of the elevators are on the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad tracks or connecting lines in the north part of town, and U.S. Highway 64 runs in an east-west direction just to the south of Elevators Y and Z.

Enid hit its peak with a total grain storage capacity of 80,000,000 bushels in 1987. The 1980 grain embargo instated by President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter

James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

, a poor economy, and drought lead to the closure of several of the elevators. In 1989, the Union Equity Co-Operative Exchange Elevators A and B and the Oklahoma Wheat Pool Terminal Elevator were shut down. Enid continues to have the largest grain storage capacity in the United States and the third largest in the world.

List of Grain Elevators

Name	Year Built	Location	Architect	Capacity (million bushels)	Notes
Pillsbury Milling Elevator	1928	515 E. Birch		2.5
Enid Terminal Elevator	1925	1015 North Van Buren Street	Jones-Hettelsater Construction Company of Kansas City, Missouri	2
Southwest Terminal Elevator	1926	1700 N. 10th Street		1	Also known as Feuquay and Salina Terminal Elevator.
General Mills Elevator	1929	1702 North 10th Street		2
Oklahoma Wheat Pool Terminal Elevator	1930, 1935	1801 North 16th Street	Jones-Hettelsater Construction Company of Kansas City, Missouri	2.1	Also called the Farmers’ National Grain Corporation Elevator and Continental Grain Company Elevator.
Union Equity Co-Operative Exchange Elevator A	1931	1801 N. 10th Street		7.6
Union Equity Co-Operative Exchange Elevator B	1946	1801 N. 10th Street	Chalmers and Borton Construction Company of Hutchinson, Kansas	11	This elevator was the first to be designed in the shape of a hexagon, which maximized storage space. E.N. Puckett, Union Equity general manager, received inspiration from a hotel's bathroom tile design.
Union Equity Co-Operative Exchange Elevator Z	1949–1951		Chalmers and Borton Construction Company of Hutchinson, Kansas	15.3
Union Equity Co-Operative Exchange Elevator Y	1953–1954			16.3	In 1956 this was the largest conventional grain elevator in the world at the time of construction.