Down by the Feed Mill: The Past and Present of America’s Feed Mills and Grain Elevators

More than 240 fascinating photos bring to light the importance of feed mills to American townspeople, economies, and heritage. This wealth of contemporary new photos, together with some vintage images from museum collections, give us a visual record of a changing, and passing, American institution. Covering a time frame of more than 150 years, the book’s illuminating text explains what feed mills and grain elevators do, how they work, the role they have played in the American agricultural economy, and the relationship of these businesses to their farmer customers. By focusing on three mills in depth we learn the changing technological and economic conditions that shaped, and sometimes destroyed, mills. These evocative photos capture mills in the southern half of Michigan’s lower peninsula, chosen to be representative of the US mills as a whole in terms of their variety, historic evolution, and characteristics.
AUTHOR:
David Hanks is an industrial photographer and a film and video producer, and is especially fascinated by subjects that show the wear of the passage of time. His photographs demonstrate an intense involvement with things mechanical. His published books include works on historical architecture and regional history. He has travelled extensively across the US with a camera close at hand, and his focus on building a comprehensive photographic record of feed mills spa ns several decades.

240 colour and b/w images