Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
OGDEN — As Weber County evolves, local boosters have been increasingly pinning their economic hopes on industrial and manufacturing growth, particularly in the open western expanses of the county.
As the same time, farmland has given way to homes and subdivisions as the population grows.
Now comes another indicator of the changing times — the ongoing demolition of the massive Farmers Grain Cooperative grain elevator in the 2800 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, in an industrial zone of west Ogden. The work began in mid-February, according to Jared Johnson, Ogden's interim director of community and economic development. It should be complete by mid-April, said Ogden Fire Marshal Kevin Brown.
Meantime, the demolition — crane-like machines with long arms tearing the ubiquitous concrete structure apart one piece at a time — has been drawing the attention of locals and prompting a measure of teary-eyed nostalgia. The structure was completed in 1941, according to articles from the period in the Ogden Standard-Examiner, with the storage tanks measuring as tall as 110 feet and the two head houses rising up 185 feet.
"I guess that's what you call progress. The world's changing. The area's changing," Dean Martini, a Weber County farmer, said ruefully. "I'm always sad to see a big change like that."
Martini, who was visiting the site with his wife Kathy on Tuesday, to watch the demolition, has been a farmer all his life and used the storage bins at the elevator until it closed, maybe three or four years ago. The owners of the grain elevator and the 20-acre site where it sits, Utah Central Railway, a subsidiary of Jacksonville, Florida-based Patriot Rail, didn't delve into the reasoning behind the demolition when contacted. But Kathy Martini has her suspicions.
"Not as many farms. It wasn't paying for itself," she said.
Tyson Sugihara, a local man who also visited the location on Tuesday, echoed her.
"It's unfortunate that we don't have the farms to support the grain storage any longer that this community was based off of," he said. "Mixed feelings. I know that you can't stand in the way of progress, and if something like this needs to go for something greater to take place, I'm all for it."
Nevertheless, he expressed distaste at the notion of apartments or condominiums taking the place of the grain elevator "like we've been seeing throughout the Wasatch Front." That, though, isn't in the offing as the site abuts a rail line and sits in an area zoned for industrial development.
Patriot Rail said in a statement it has "reimagined development" at the location in conjunction with the grain elevator demolition. A marketing document geared to would-be buyers notes its proximity to I-15 just to the north and the rail line to the rear of the elevator. Patriot Rail calls the location Ogden Transload.
"Due to the region's limited warehouse and transload capacity, the Ogden Transload provides an optimal location to develop new infrastructure to support these areas of need. With roughly 20 acres of industrial zoned land, this site is ideal for multi-commodity transloading and/or warehousing that will support the growth of the Wasatch Front," the marketing document reads.
The nearby I-15/24th Street intersection is to be reconfigured and rebuilt in the years to come to improve interstate access in west Ogden. But a Utah Department of Transportation rep said the grain elevator site doesn't figure in the plans.
Focus on manufacturing, industry
As hinted at by the Martinis, the demolition of the grain elevator comes as acreage dedicated to farming in western Weber County declines and undeveloped land is used to build homes, apartment buildings and subdivisions.
Weber County was home to 1,166 farms collectively operating across 78,688 acres in 2022, according to the Utah Census of Agriculture for the year. In 1950, the county was home to 1,943 farms operating across 351,360 acres, a landmass including acreage individual farms owned in abutting counties. Another measure of the change — the county was home to 18,126 acres of harvested cropland as of 2022, down from 48,098 acres as of 1949.
At the same time, economic development efforts in Weber County now center not on farming but manufacturing and the industrial sector.
Notably, Weber County commissioners are promoting efforts to develop an inland port facility spread across 8,785 acres in the county's western reaches, a largely undeveloped area zoned for heavy industry and manufacturing. County leaders have long promoted such development in the area in part because of rail access and its proximity to I-15 via the 12th Street corridor, an east-west roadway that extends from Ogden to the far reaches of western Weber County.
As for the grain elevator demolition, the many storage tanks will be demolished by machinery, according to Brown, the Ogden fire marshal. The two taller head houses that loom above the tanks will be imploded, probably sometime in April. "It's a big enough site, they have enough room that we felt they could do the work safely," Brown said.
Though one grain elevator will be going, others remain in Weber County, including two west of Wall Avenue between 28th and 31st streets in Ogden. Nonetheless, it was a sad experience on Tuesday for Dean Martini as he watched the old Farmers Grain Cooperative structure getting dismantled.
"Lot of memories there," he said.
Contributing: Mike Anderson
