Jet Lowe’s documentary photographs of Buffalo’s majestic grain elevators were taken in 1990-91 for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), an agency of the National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. The HAER's mission is to record industrial structures that have played a significant role in shaping American life and to archive that documentation in the Library of Congress. Buffalo, where the grain elevator was invented, has the most outstanding collection of existing grain elevators in the United States.
On loan from the Industrial Heritage Committee Inc., these photographs were part of an exhibition on Buffalo’s grain elevators presented in 1997 at the Burchfield Penney. The documentation project and exhibition originally were funded by the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the James Cary Evans Endowment. This display was made possible through cooperation from the Office of the Mayor.