It’s natural to assume the people who built elevators were well-acquainted with those who operated them, especially when they were employed by companies in Omaha.
In 1934, how well acquainted were the employees of Van Ness Construction with the men of Crowell Elevator Co.? Was it cozy among them?
Operating elevators in many towns, Crowell appears to have been a syndicate unto itself, but so far, we have been unable to learn much about them.
We do know, however, that in 1934 Van Ness did a repair job for Crowell at the tiny Phelps County town of Funk, which is near Holdrege, in south-central Nebraska.
Reginald Tillotson took photos, and on the back of one he noted, “After repair work, Crowell Elevator Co.”
That’s the sum of our information to date, but there’s always the hope of additional revelations.
Looking at the photos, it’s not possible to say what kind of repair work. All we can determine is that there was a modest, metal-clad elevator along the tracks—and not much elese—in Funk.
Four years after their 1937 call to remedy fire loss at George Neuswanger’s elevator in Alliance, Nebr., the Tillotsons returned to that Panhandle town with the commission to build more storage and a feed mill.
The Alliance Times-Herald reported as follows:
Construction work has begun on a large warehouse and feed processing plant here by the J.H. Tillotson contracting company of Omaha for George Neuswanger of Alliance.
We are unsure how “J.H. Tillotson contracting company” got the credit. The brothers Reginald and Joseph Tillotson formed Tillotson Construction Co. in 1938. We believe a rupture between then led to the founding of Joseph H. Tillotson, Contractor in 1948. Joe Tillotson died not long afterward in a car accident. There could be more to learn on this question, but until then we rely on existing records and previous verbal accounts.
The newspaper continued:
The building will be located just north of the Neuswanger elevator. The warehouse will be 148 feet long and 50 feet wide, and the feed processing mill will be 32 feet square. Total cost of the project has been listed at $12,000.
According to Neuswanger, some difficulty is being experienced in the obtaining of material, and he has no idea when the building which will be of reinforced concrete construction, will be completed. At this time much of the excavation work has been completed by a dragline which has been in operation this week.
The newspaper added these details:
Concrete mixing machinery is already in place at the site, a tool and supply shed has been erected, and some of the forms are being built. Much of the gravel which will be needed has been hauled to the site also.
When the feed processing plant is put into operation, mixing and grinding of many types of livestock feed will be carried on here, Neuswanger said.
In part because of the large barley crop, grain storage facilities were at a premium in those months just before the United States entered World War Two. Nebraska farmers were expected to harvest 33 million bushels of grain.
While there was sufficient capacity for 55 million bushels in total, space was available for only 13.5 million.
The federal government allowed farmers seven cents per bushel towards putting up new storage silos on their farms.
Otherwise, a state official had this suggestion: “Another way to store the coming harvest is to bind and stack it. Stacking is becoming a lost art, but it is still an excellent method.”
A series of vivid photos shows work underway in 1935 as a crew undertakes the construction of a new storage annex and feed mill after fire loss at an elevator site in Alliance, Nebr. In this case, we assume the job was in the hands of Van Ness Construction Co., of Omaha, and Reginald Tillotson, employed by Van Ness along with his father Charles H. Tillotson, took the photos while working on the project. It wasn’t until 1938 that Charles H. Tillotson passed away, and Reginald and his brother Joseph formed Tillotson Construction Co.
Alliance is an important market town in Box Butte County, located in the Nebraska Panhandle. The client on this project was George Neuswanger, an oil and grain merchant.
“He first came to Alliance, after graduation from the University of Nebraska, in 1916 when he served as Box Butte County agent,” the Alliance Times-Herald would explain in a 1966 obituary.
The Times-Herald explains the construction activity in an article of July 16, 1935:
Work on a new small-grain elevator being built for George Neuswanger is in progress at the location where the Neuswanger building burned last spring at the southwest corner of the city and plans call for the new structure to be completed within a month’s time, ready to house a bumper harvest.
About 30 men are receiving employment, erecting a cribbed elevator of wood which will be covered with galvanized metal. The project was begun three weeks ago.
The elevator will be 150 by 30 feet and will be 60 feet high. Its capacity is to be 100,000 bushels.
Mr. Neuswanger intends to store only small grain in the building. He sees ahead a need for more space, with harvest conditions ideal and chances good for a splendid yield in this territory.
Neuswanger’s bad luck continued in August of 1937 when a tornado missed Alliance by a mile but struck four of his hog barns on a feed lot north of town. There was no mention of what happened to the hogs.
Our collection of Reginald Tillotson’s early 1930s photos includes two “before” and two “after” snapshots with notes that say “Farmers Terminal Elevator, Geneva, Nebr., Repair and Ironing Job 1932.” Without photographic support, an additional note records that in the following year Van Ness Construction Co., of Omaha—which employed Reginald and his father Joseph—“Tore down two old, rebuilt one new” in the nearby Fillmore County town of Exeter.
A search of articles in the Nebraska Signal newspaper, of Geneva, turns up little additional information about either job. One item suggests the elevator had been closed during the spring. Further elaboration is awaited.
We did learn that by January of 1932, a pair of burglars, Louis Shallenberg and Clifford Crowder, had been arrested in Grand Island and “confessed to robbing the farmers’ elevator at Exeter and taking a radio and other articles valued at $50. They are also implicated in numerous other robberies in this and nearby counties. Shallenberg was released from the pen last summer after completing a term for robbery and Crowder recently served a jail sentence at Wilber.”
Farmers Elevator, Geneva, Nebr., 1932 “After” photos. The “Before” photos are seen at top.
In lieu of information about elevator “repair and ironing,” we present the following items from the Nebraska Signal that describe 1932 activities in Geneva.
The annual business meeting of the Farmers elevator was held Tuesday afternoon at the I.O.O.F. temple. The meeting was called to order by the president, Henry Jensen. At the election of officers Fred Underwood was re-elected secretary and Henry Kolar and William Morgan were re-elected directors. The report showed that the company had a good business year and a ten per cent dividend was declared on shares, eight percent on gas and one-half cent on grain. About $90 of undivided profit was given to the American Legion fund. Due to the blocked condition of the roads only about forty were present. Nebraska Signal, Jan 14, 1932
The Farmers Elevator of Geneva will open Saturday, April 30, and thereafter on Friday and Saturday each week until further notice. We will have a full line of farm seeds. Will exchange some for some good seed corn. Come and see our new machinery at used machinery prices. Sheridan Grain & Machinery Co. Nebraska Signal, Apr. 28, 1932
Orange cane, Honeydrip and black, 50 cents per bushel. Fridays and Saturdays every week at Farmers elevator, Geneva, Neb. We buy grain Fridays and Saturdays only. Wm. Sheridan. Nebraska Signal, May 26, 1932
The Farmers Elevator will be open every day after July 1. Phone 98. Nebraska Signal, June 30, 1932
We will pay a premium for mixed wheat and oats. Also have Grim alfalfa seed at $6.50 per bushel. Farmers Elevator. Nebraska Signal Aug. 11, 1932
The Farmers Elevator Co. at Geneva will have No. 66 Turkey Red seed wheat free from rye will exchange for other wheat reasonable. 48-1. Nebraska Signal, Aug. 24, 1932
It was an uneventful run through the night until the track led Burlington No. 22 to the flyspeck town of Corning in northwest Missouri. Corning wasn’t even normally a whistlestop but now, at 2.30 a.m., the locomotive’s crew released a blast to alert the sleeping Holt County community that their Farmers Grain Co. elevator was burning.
A hell of a blaze was going by the time the fire crew arrived on scene, and they couldn’t stop the destruction. The coup de grâce occurred when the roof fell in, and by dawn on that Saturday, April 29, 1933, the elevator had collapsed and was a smoldering ruin. Authorities indicated the fire had started under the cob bin. The elevator and its contents were insured for $8,000.
It would become a case of Van Ness Construction, from 95 miles away in Omaha, to the rescue.
Oddly enough, on the very day before, a newspaper called The Holt County Democrat and The Craig Leader had run a substantial profile of the Farmers Grain Co. as part of a feature titled “Who’s Who in Neighboring Towns.”
Under the management of J.D. Ahrens (no relation to the present blogger), the “well known firm” was successful for years.
“They are a reliable firm that gives correct weights, top prices and superior service,” the profile declared. “They demand a specific standard and maintain this standard to their customers.”
The elevator was “practically indispensable to the farming community surrounding Corning” and had even “won a place in the hearts of the farmers through their excellent service and treatment.”
Obviously, quick replacement of the elevator would be a priority. Van Ness, which employed my great-grandfather Charles H. Tillotson and grandfather Reginald O. Tillotson, who was in his mid-twenties, came onto the scene.
So sure of a good outcome were the principals of Farmers Grain that, on June 23, The Holt County Democrat reported one V.A. Solleder had bought a Chevrolet truck for use at the elevator.
“Heretofore the elevator has been handicapped because of the inability to make delivery of coal, cobs and grain, also in hauling from the Farmers, their grain,” the news item said.
“The truck will be an important asset to the business.”
Meanwhile, the Omaha crew toiled on with help from some local men who joined in.
Only a few finishing touches remained to be completed when Farmers Elevator placed a July 14 ad in the Leader informing “all our old patrons and … friends in the Corning and Craig communities … we are ready to receive your grain.”
Van Ness performed its part with unprecedented skill and speed.
“It was exactly forty-eight days from the time the contractor began the work on the new building until it was ready for use,” a July 23 article reported. Farmer James Mavity arrived with the first load of wheat.
The new elevator that was bigger than the old by some 5,000 bushels, giving a total capacity of 18,000 bushels, and work was completed at the tidy price of $7,000, which ensured the cooperative’s solvency.
Near the end of that job, Reginald snapped the photo we see with this post, providing enduring evidence of the Tillotsons’ handiwork.
A lone worker adds finishing touches to an elevator in this photo dated Oct. 4, 1934 and inscribed “Shelby, Nebraska.” Shelby is today a town of 600 in Polk County, south of Columbus. The man balances on rudimentary scaffolding at the top of the structure, which we estimate to be about 55 feet high. A Ford coupe is parked on the ground below.
It is unknown whether this elevator was an all-new facility or the replacement for a damaged one. The nearest we can come to answering the question is a brief report in the Polk County News of the previous year.
“The Shelby elevators assumed a business activity on Monday (July 10, 1933) that reminded one of former days of prosperity, as we are informed that 213 loads of corn were delivered to the elevators that day, and the price paid was 47c per bushel.
“To show the difference in the price of farm products now and a little over four months ago, we reprint the markets as printed in the Sun on March 2, in comparison with the markets of today. We leave the reader to draw his own conclusions as to the cause of this improvement in the grain market. There’s a reason.”
Please see the news clip for price tables. Our interest is drawn to the phrase “Shelby elevators.” It’s impossible to say how many there were, or to account for this new elevator presumably built by Van Ness Construction, of Omaha, with Tillotson involvement.
We welcome comments from readers on wooden elevator construction methods. Another news item that came up in our search said a 20,000-bushel elevator in another Nebraska town was estimated to cost $7,000.
It would also be interesting to hear what “reason” the Polk editor had in mind about price improvements.
The Tillotson homestead north of Omaha was sold in 2025, and as a consequence Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators has received a few leaves from a photo album with snapshots of 1930s jobs. Together, these pictures comprise the earliest documentation we’ve ever seen of Van Ness Construction and Tillotson activities.
After the sudden passing of Charles H. Tillotson in 1938, his sons Reginald and Joseph built Tillotson Construction Company’s first concrete elevator, located in Goltry, Oklahoma. Prior to that, they worked for Ralston Van Ness out of Omaha. The photos we received appear to show jobs done for that company earlier in the 1930s.
Most of the photos are inscribed on the back with a name, location, and date.
The above photo depicts a 1933 scene at a twin-elevator complex in Norma, North Dakota. Norma is a dot on the map in Renville County northwest of Minot and twenty or so miles south of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. A note on the album page says “Rebuilt Fire Loss 1933.”
Searching through a newspaper archive turns up no more details, so we can only look at the image and suppose the relief felt by local farmers who had limited options for grain disposition. Especially at a country location like this, a damaged elevator was an unhappy circumstance that would have required hauling grain over an extended distance.
On a sunny day at Norma, a few motor vehicles converge at the complex with at least four horse-drawn farm wagons. It’s illuminating to see wagons still in use at that time. Their limitations surely gave farmers a sense of urgency about acquiring a motor truck.
An old pickup with wooden artillery-style wheels in the right foreground was likely a Ford. It has an emblem on the driver’s door, but we can’t determine anything more about it.
Under close examination of the photo, the elevator tower in the distance appears to be labeled “Minnekota.” The sign on the near tower can’t be read at all.
A number of men are going about their business, whether they’re still seated on wagon perches, standing inside a wagon, or on the ground. In the mix of trucks and cars, note the silhouette of an automobile way down the sidetrack.
Several boxcars await service. Norma is on a secondary road leading south from North Dakota Route 5, and it seems likely the rail line was a spur. This could have been part of Soo Line operations.
We lack additional information about the event that led to the reconstruction. Newspaper pages often had stories of grain elevator fires in 1932 and 1933, with casualties in Chicago at a 200,000-bushel elevator on the river there, and with lesser tolls at smaller elevators in prairie locations.
The Bismark Tribume reported on Aug. 24, 1933 that a 20,000-bushel Minnekota Grain Co. elevator had burned at Butte, North Dakota, to the southeast of Minot. It also claimed a 14,000-bushel carload of wheat. Butte was left with three elevators after the disaster.
We invite our readers to stay with us as we post the rest of the thirty photos in the newly obtained archive.
For a 2013 post, we visited the elevator at Bird City, Kan. to learn more about its provenance. Bird City (pop. 447) is in Cheyenne County, in the northwestern corner of Kansas. The county population is about 2,500.
“It has been demonstrated that the curved headhouse was a Tillotson signature,” we wrote after the site visit. “Did someone leave the Tillotson operation and branch out on his own, or were the plans sold to Vickroy-Mong?”
Later, we followed up with the story of a blowout that occurred there in 1950, not too long after the elevator was built by Vickroy-Mong Construction Co., of Salina, Kan.
Thanks to reader Steve Wilson, who grew up in St. Francis some 15 miles from Bird City, we have new views of the aftermath of that blowout, and these give a clue as to why the name Vickroy-Mong has otherwise disappeared from history.
The elevator was announced in January of 1950. The Omaha World-Herald reported as follows:
The Bird City Equity has voted to build a 250-thousand bushel storage elevator this spring. The government will assist in the finance to the extent of 80 per cent of the cost. It will also guarantee storage income for a three-year period. A drive to raise 50 thousand dollars in capital will be staged. Total cost of the elevator is estimated to be around 160 thousand dollars.
Photos courtesy of Steve Wilson
Soon after the tanks were loaded with grain, the blowout occurred. On Aug. 24, 1950, The Herndon (Kan.) Nonpareil reported:
Approximately 15,000 bushels of the 1950 Cheyenne County wheat crop spilled out on the ground about 6 a.m. Friday when a 30′ by 8′ section of the newly constructed Bird City Equity elevator caved in. The section of wall giving way was over the loading bins on the railroad. A train was in Bird City at the time and was sent to St Francis to be turned after wheat augers brought in from the surrounding countryside had cleared a path through the grain on the tracks. More than six boxcars of wheat were loaded with the augers after the engine returned, but between 6,000 and 7,000 bushels of wheat still remained on the ground the next day, A.A. Gillispie veteran St. Francis newspaperman reported. The elevator which has a capacity of 250,000 bushels was finished shortly before harvest this year.
Photos by Gary Rich
Chalmers & Borton received the contract for the repair work. In 1958, they also won the contract for an addition of 241,000 bushels.
W. Stephen “Steve” Wilson retired as professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore. His father, Charles Wm. Wilson, M.D., served the people of Cheyenne County “doing everything from glasses to babies to surgery.” And Dr. Wilson was a photography buff. Steve Wilson provides this addendum regarding the blowout:
I was only 4, or almost 4, but it was a big deal. Lots of grain elevators in that part of the country, and they don’t usually fall apart. Worth the drive to see it!
In 2009, I took my kid out to see where I was from (the year before he graduated from high school). We went out to one of the elevators in St. Francis, the county seat. This was an elevator [where] they would take us kids up to the top, and we would throw model airplanes with cherry bombs in them.
However, when my son and I started walking towards the elevator, someone ran out of the office and told us we couldn’t get close to the elevator. Homeland security rules. What a waste of resources! If a terrorist wants to blow up a grain elevator in a town of 1,500 where you still have to drive 175 miles to get to a town of 25,000, that’s not a bright idea. Spending money to prevent it is even stupider.
The elevator in Gordon, Nebr. was built by Mayer-Osborn, as attested by its manhole covers. It was built in their iconic style.
Story and photos by Kristen Cart
When someone reaches their middle eighties intact and in good health, they can do whatever they want. It’s a reward that comes along with advanced age. Okay–it has to be within reason–say, within the budget, but there shouldn’t be any major obstacles, unless care-giving is in the picture. With my dad, Gerry Osborn, no such obstacle existed in 2019, before Covid-19 made its debut.
Gerry Osborn at the courthouse in Rushville, Nebr.
Dad and I had taken a western driving tour in 2018 to visit the house where I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, which he had architecturally restored from a sadly worn and altered state. It was a foursquare brick farmhouse with historic ties to early Mormon settlers. The current and longtime owner, Gundi Jones, kindly gave us a tour. We admired her finishing touches, which updated the mid-seventies decor as we had left it, to a European country style. It was beautiful.
We also took in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, before heading east for a stop at Mesa Verde, a marvelous place that captured Dad’s imagination. He was especially taken with its large collection of pre-Columbian artifacts.
Then, on our way home, we stopped at the Nuckolls County courthouse in Nelson, Nebr. The place brought back old memories. Dad explained that when he was a young student, he and his friends would play a game where they collected sightings of Nebraska license plates, each identified by a number designating its county of origin, 1 to 93. Each county was assigned a number, to be displayed on the license plate, in the order of the number of automobile registrations extant in each county as of 1922. So the most populous county was assigned the number 1, and plates with the number 93 were quite scarce.
Dad and his friends raced to try to find a plate from every county. The hardest ones to collect were from small counties at the other end of the state from Dad’s hometown of Fremont, Nebr.
Now he said that he would like to find them all by visiting every county courthouse in the state. He also wanted to see each courthouse out of curiosity–he loved the old architecture.
At the far left, the Mayer-Osborn elevator at Gordon, Nebr. displays the stepped, rounded head house typical of the company.
I said, “Sure, why not?” It made perfect sense to me, since I was a collector of all sorts of things, with an irresistible impulse to complete the set, whatever it happened to be. License plates sounded like a great excuse to spend time with my dad, while setting the world in order by collecting them all.
Beginning in early 2019, we started our project. We decided to photograph Dad in front of each courthouse, while surreptitiously snapping a shot of a local license plate. He had great fun Google-mapping our routes and itineraries, and over the course of the year, we completed our mission, taking several day trips and a couple of overnighters. We didn’t research any of the courthouses before we visited the county seats. Instead, we saved our first impressions for later, so each courthouse would be a surprise. Sometimes we would gasp in awe as a magnificent courthouse came into view; other times, we would sigh in disappointment.
The grain elevator in Merriman shares the characteristics of its predecessor in McCook, Nebr. and other Mayer-Osborn elevators, including its neighbor in Gordon, but we have not confirmed its builder.
Dad and I covered the entire state during our courthouse expedition, and incidentally, we crossed paths with his father Bill Osborn’s travels when we stumbled upon some of his grain elevators. Bill Osborn was based in Denver for a good part of his career as a builder, but he got back to Nebraska a few times while building elevators for Joe Tillotson and later for himself as partner in Mayer-Osborn.
Dad recognized the name of one of the elevators we encountered shortly after we visited the courthouse in Rushville, the seat of Sheridan County.
The elevator at Gordon, Nebr. (a town along Hwy. 20) had the trademark Mayer-Osborn rounded and stepped headhouse, and it followed the plan of their other larger elevators. It also sported manhole covers embossed with the name of the builder, which confirmed Dad’s thought that his father had built it. What a happy find!
Another view of the beautiful grain storage facility in Merriman, Nebr.
Its twin in neighboring Merriman, a town further east along Hwy. 20, had the same headhouse as the Gordon elevator and the same general plan as seen from the outside, but we couldn’t corroborate its origin, either by manhole cover, local attribution, or Dad’s memory. Yet we put it down as a strong maybe.
The elevator at Limon, Colo. had confounded us for a long time because of its resemblance to other Mayer-Osborn’s elevators, until we found that it was built after Bill Osborn had left the business. So there’s also a question mark over the elevator at Merriman until we can learn more.
Unfortunately our itinerary was pretty tightly planned, or we would have tried to track down someone who knew the history of the two elevators. We set the locations aside for a future visit. Now, years later, we haven’t been back, but we still have some photos to share here.
David Herbert Hatch is senior pastor at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Green Bay, Wisc. He worked slip-form construction on elevators throughout Iowa in the early to mid-1970s.
I would like to tell you a story.
Word is that one fall, after a grain elevator had serviced the community harvest, a federal inspector came for a look at the facility.
Unable to find the elevator manager, he took the liberty to climb a ladder outside a tank, all the way to the top. He opened a manhole cover, stepped through with his flashlight, and walked over the grain.
Using a re-rod, he probed around, checking the grain. Its high level in the tank at this time of year was a surprise.
“It should have gone to market by now,” he thought.
When he returned to the bottom the manager had arrived.
“Why is it that you have so much grain in the elevator?” the inspector asked.
“There’s no grain in it whatsoever,” the manager said.
He opened a steel door.
The inspector peered into an empty tank.
They shone the flashlight beam to the top and, even to the manager’s shock, saw a frozen ring of grain.
If the inspector had fallen through, with his probe, it would have been the end of his life.
David Hatch was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. Prior to college studies, Pastor Dave worked construction and had hopes of serving in law enforcement until his partial color-blindness prevented that. He did not know what to do with his life. Through God’s Providence and a phone call from his sister, who was a kindergarten teacher in Milwaukee, he enrolled in a college where, unknown to him, many of his future classmates were studying to be pastors. He received his education at Concordia College in Milwaukee; Concordia Teacher’s College, River Forest, Ill.; and Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind. His pastoral career began in 1982, following seminary, when he served as an admissions counselor at Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y. and parish pastor at Love Lutheran Church outside of Albany, N.Y.
Our Grandfathers' Grain Elevators 