Here is an ocean steamship at a Portland wharf ready to load a cargo of wheat. Comparing the three major wheat export districts of the United States over a period of seven years, 1925 to 1931, inclusive, Portland ranks second each year with the exception of 1927 when she placed first. That puts Portland first as a wheat port on the Pacific Coast and second in the United States.
Image Description from historic lecture booklet: "The docks of Buenos Aires, like those of our great lake city, are most impressive; they represent an outlay of $50,000,000. Only fifteen years ago the visitor was bundled ashore in a rowboat and deposited on a marshy beach. Now his vessel enters one of the numerous basins of the vast dock system and confronts row upon row of massive masonry and cement wharves, behind which spreads a network of railway lines. In the background are public gardens with flowering bushes and statuary to beautify the approach to the city. For mile after mile, flanked by a seemingly endless procession of great trans-Atlantic ships and up-river produce boats, these docks stretch their length, not in a series of ships, as along the congested water-front in New York but so arranged that the vessels can moor broadside to them and have their cargoes loaded or unloaded by enormous traveling cranes; and , without , lying at anchor in the river awaiting their turn for a berth, are many more--for this giant enterprise, with towering grain elevators and a veritable forest of powerful cranes, already fails entirely to satisfy present needs. They are not only to be extended but so enlarged that they will accommodate vessels of the heaviest draft."
