An Advance In Wheat

Our Market is now in a condition which should give it the attention of growers of wheat throughout the North West.  By reference to our sales report it will be seen that there was an advance yesterday of about three cents per bushel over previously full figures – prime and choice fall grades selling at ninety to ninety-five cents.  Among the day’s sales were two lots of club aggregating twenty thousand bushels, which sold for future delivery.  These prices point to St. Louis as the best paying market in the West and Northwest at present, and sales of the above kind noted indicate that supplies are insufficient for the wants of buyers.

Our old customers on the upper rivers and at railway stations in Illinois, are too sparing in their shipments this season, probably because they think that we are cut off temporarily from our extensive southern trade connections, we have comparatively little want of the product of their wheat fields.  They know the height character of St. Louis flour, and the production of the mills of this city.  They should rather reflect therefore, that we have supplied and can still supply foreign as well as home ports, Northern States as well as Southern, and that the brands of our millers, particularly those for family use, reach kitchens and bakeries all across the continent from New England to Oregon.  This want, then, is again to be met, large quantities are needed for our immense armies now in the field, and shipments must go to New York and other seaboard ports to be sent thence to foreign distributing marts.  Railroad freights are falling, the Ohio river is in excellent navigable condition to its source, and everything favors the giving of good if not full employment to our mills.  They are ready for such employment, and only need liberal receipts of wheat to give it them.  Cannot our country readers consider that quick sales and fair await their consignments, and send down their grain in something like the old liberal fashion. – {Mo. Rep.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 5, 1862, p. 2