Saginaw: Grain, Rails & Wings

Saginaw rode the railroad into being and then rode grain to fame — by the mid-20th century the elevators rising over its tracks made it one of the nation's busiest grain-handling hubs, the smell of milled feed hanging over the town. But Saginaw was a small farming community of a hundred souls before all that, with churches organized as early as 1911 and a cemetery founded by Missouri pioneers in the 1890s. This short driving loop pairs that quiet pioneer core in the north with a very different kind of landmark on the southern edge: a 1930s commercial-aviation hangar and the vintage warbirds housed nearby, a reminder that the same flat prairie that grew grain also grew runways. From a country Methodist church to a B-17 in a hangar, it's a tour about everything that moved through Saginaw — by rail, by truck, and by air.