OXFORD, Ohio — Seeing a grain elevator in the skyline of this college town, home to Miami University, seems an anomaly. At one time there was probably a hog operation on every street in Oxford Township, but not anymore, said Gary Salmon, the manager of that elevator, Oxford Farm Service, for 40 years.

“Now, I don’t believe there is anybody raising hogs in Oxford Township,” he said. “One person has a finishing barn that brings them in, but they weren’t raised here. Everybody used to either farrow their own pigs or they bought some. There’s zero today.”

The mill, currently owned by Ralph Schwegman and the Jack Hansel family trust, was begun in 1947. In its prime in the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s it handled 350,000-400,000 bushels of grain a year, Salmon said. Nowadays it annually processes approximately 80,000 bushels of soybeans and about the same amount of corn. It quit handling wheat four years ago because of storage problems.

Salmon buys oats to mix in feed for farmers because little is raised in the area.

“When I first started here there were probably four of us mixing feed,” he said. “Now there is one – myself. Usually we didn’t get everything done that we needed to do every day, now we do. Part of that is due to the fact that some of the larger farmers do their own drying and mixing on their farm, and part to the fact that there’s less livestock.”

The business is holding its own, but every year it gets harder to survive, Salmon said. Right next door, the busy Whistle Stop lawn, garden and pet shop is owned by the partnership and having that business has helped. Sharon Hansel, the late Jack Hansel’s wife, and his daughter, Kelly, run that store.

The mill has had a series of owners. Hansel bought Don Murray out in 1977. Ralph Schwegman came on as a partner in 1985. When Hansel died in 2004, Schwegman and the Hansel family trust continued the operation.

“Jack started work at the mill right out of high school and he never left,” said Sharon. “He started in the cob bin (after the corn was shelled the cob went into the bin, which had to be emptied periodically) and worked his way up.”

The facility had a railroad siding – a section of track that allows a train to pull over to the side and off a main line, with a switch at both ends – when Salmon started work there. A train derailed in Oxford in the mid-1970s and the railroad took the siding out after that.

“They didn’t replace the siding and they indicated later that they would come back and do that,” Salmon said. “Then we contacted the railroad they weren’t interested in fixing it. They said we could put the equipment switch back in ourselves; it was quite an investment, so we declined.”

Salmon tries to keep the equipment – an old hammer mill, a crimper, two vertical mixers used to mix feed and a liquid molasses tank – well-maintained, and so far he has been able to find parts to repair them when necessary.

He likes his work, pointing out he wouldn’t have been there for 40 years if he didn’t.

“It’s different every day,” he said. “It’s not like working someplace where you do the same routine every day. Different people come in – all my customers and previous customers. Agricultural people are different; they’re easier to work with than some other people.”

(This is the fourth in a short series about older grain elevators in the Midwest, and how – or if – they are still doing business today.)