The rapid development of an export trade in grain to Europe between 1870 and 1874 was a direct result of improvements in agriculture and the opening up of a surplus grain-producing area. As yet this territory lay mainly east and south of Chicago. Even as late as 1882, over four-fifths of the eastbound trunk line traffic originated not further west than Illinois. Wisconsin and Iowa contributed less than ten per cent. of this business. The methods of handling wheat were still quite primitive. During the Civil War thousands of men were employed to unload the grain by hand, every tenth barrel being weighed. Elevators had been used in Chicago for some time but no eastern city had them until 1861. Prior to 1872, when the first grain elevator was set up at Baltimore, the cost of thus unloading grain by hand amounted to four or five cents per bushel. At Boston until 1867, all the export grain was still unloaded back of the city and hauled across to the waterfront.
The volume of exportable surplus products of the country rose rapidly after 1870. An increase from five or six bushels of wheat production _per capita_ in 1860, to nearly nine bushels in 1879, left a large margin for foreign sale. The growth of such traffic, big with importance for the carriers, is indicated by the opposite diagram. The large total of 59,000,000 bushels of wheat and (equivalent) wheat flour reached in 1862, partly as a result of the closing of markets in the southern states, was not again surpassed for more than a decade. The most notable increase ensued after 1873, when the level rose about fifty per cent., to become established thereafter upon a permanently higher plane. A second sudden boost occurred again in 1877 when wheat exports rose rapidly to a total of 180,000,000 bushels within three years. The disastrous failure of European crops in 1879, with a coincident bumper yield in the United States, led to the immediate climax of the movement in 1881. These exports, moreover, which fifty years earlier, owing to the cost of carriage, were almost exclusively in the form of flour, were now in 1880 about three-fourths constituted of raw wheat. Examination of the diagram with its steep pyramid of development at this time is convincing as to the stimulus thereby given to the railway interests. Foreign trade in cattle and beef products also enormously increased during these years. In 1876 only 244 steers were exported, while in 1877, 71,794, and in 1881, 134,000 head were shipped abroad. The value of preserved meats exported quadrupled in one year after 1877, and grew eightfold by 1880. Doubtless part of this disposition of products abroad during the seventies was due to a cessation of demand at home owing to the prevalent hard times; but the important discovery was incidentally made that the demand abroad existed, and merely required cheap transportation for its successful development.