Kerndt G., and Brothers Elevator and Warehouses, No. 11, No.12 and No. 13

This elevator and warehouse complex is significant as an essentially intact artifact of the late 19th and early 20th-century grain shipping industry in Iowa. Although it has not been used for its original purpose for many years, this complex, with grain moving and loading machinery and mechanisms still in place, offers a vivid look at now largely obsolete methods of storing and preparing grain for shipment. The grain trade was an important early business in eastern Iowa: communities such as McGregor, Lansing, and Guttenberg were in the mid-late 19th century made prosperous as centers to which area farmers brought their wheat to be sold and then shipped on the Mississippi River, or later by rail, to large processors in such cities as Minneapolis, Davenport, and St. Louis.

The buildings are also significant locally, for their association with the Kerndt family of Lansing, whose extensive business activities, from the mid-19th century to the present, have in large measure dominated the history of the community. Gustave Kerndt was the first of five brothers to emigrate from Germany to the U.S. He arrived in New York in 1849, and spent several years in Schenectady making brooms and later cigars. Moritz arrived in 1853, by which time Gustav had opened a cigar factory in New York City. The next year, Moritz traveled west, ending up in Dubuque. Soon the whole Kerndt family joined Moritz in Iowa. Brother Hermann became a farmer in rural Allamakee County, while the rest of the family settled on the river at Lansing. With Hermann farming, and another brother, Julius, dying soon after coming to Iowa, the family fortunes were left up to the remaining three brothers, Gustav, Moritz, and William.

G. Kerndt and Bros. began in Lansing with a broom factory, but soon expanded their activities. They built their first warehouse in the late 1850s, and in about 1861 began an office building and a retail grocery establishment. The store eventually included a banking operation, which is still in business today as the G. Kerndt and Bros. Savings Bank. The first warehouse was eventually removed, and an elevator and warehouse were constructed of brick and stone in 1868. (From Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, it appears that the present elevator portion was built between 1886 and 1894.) Eventually, G. Kerndt and Bros. operated 14 warehouses along the levee at Lansing and accounted for a high proportion of that community's river commerce.