Reader Jim Kay has helped us to answer a question. Kay went to the Ottawa County Historical Museum, where he’s an advisory board member, and dug into the files. Therein he found a photo of a wood elevator ablaze in Minneapolis, Kan. near the concrete elevator built in 1947 by Tillotson Construction Co.
The caption beneath the photo reads: “Remember the elevator fire of 1947? The blaze was at the Farmers Elevator in Minneapolis. The fireman walking toward the truck is thought to be the late Floyd Forney. Photo Courtesy of Lew Wilcox.”
Kay adds his own note: “Date should read 1952.”
Blog partner Kristen Cart first visited Minneapolis years ago, a visit I’d forgotten when I went there on my road trip and as I wrote a subsequent post. Kristen had already identified the elevator as Tillotson’s 100,000-bushel job that’s listed in our records.
With more than 500 posts and 1,700 images since 2011, it’s not always easy to remember.
Kristen’s listed all the specifications of the 1947 job and inserted some nice photos, including the one above. At the time of its construction and for some years after, the elevator was unique because of the integrated cupola (below). It was later retrofitted with the boxy high-rise cupola seen in the more recent photos.
Tillotson returned in 1948 to build the mill building.
Kristen wrote:
The elevator was starkly beautiful, balanced, and gracefully situated in its surroundings. Though it was small, its graceful proportions made it seem monumental.
On my visit, photo above, I missed the embossed manhole covers Kristen had already identified. The employee who came out of the office to greet me said the whole complex was the work of Chalmers & Borton, and instead of prowling around I took him at his word and then listened to him say the Tillotson elevator must have been the one destroyed by a fire, which he thought was in the 1990s.
Jim Kay has now verified that there was a fire. The rest of the tall tale I was given doesn’t match other facts we’ve turned up. What is now known thanks to Jim’s diligence is that the Tillotson elevator escaped a fire, then served as the anchor for an expanded operation, with a retrofitted cupola and storage annex by Chalmers & Borton.
The graceful Tillotson elevator is a survivor, still on the job. All gratitude to Jim Kay for his legwork, helping to flesh out the story.
One of the last photos from the archive of Tillotson Construction Co. that relates to our exploration of southwest Kansas is from the tiny Stevens County town of Moscow. Time was scarce and we weren’t able to swing by the elevators in Moscow, Rolla, or Elkhart in that part of the state, but the aerial photo gives us a good look.
The single-leg elevator in Moscow stands along the Cimarron Valley Railroad and U.S. Route 56. It was built on an original plan in 1948, duplicating the curved-cupola that Tillotson had worked out the previous year in nearby Satanta.
The 100,000-bushel Moscow elevator had four tanks measuring 14 feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height. The job required 1,070 cubic yards of reinforced concrete and 49.8 tons of reinforcing steel (including jack rods).
The main slab was 40 x 45 feet and covered 1,712 square feet. The gross weight loaded was 5,490 tons.
The cupola was 14 x 36 x 23 feet (L x W x H). Pulley centers in the leg were 145.5 feet apart.
A note in the records, at the bottom of page 3 (not shown), says “Bad weather.” A second note, this one on 3A, indicates the office building at the site was also part of the build.
I’d like to say more about the history of the Moscow elevator, but from lack of access to digitized Kansas newspaper files, I can’t find contemporary reports of the construction nor any background on Moscow Elevator Company or E.L. Gaskill & Sons, whose names are proclaimed in the aerial image.
For now, I have to satisfy myself with the knowledge it was a good-looking elevator when new, another example of Tillotson style.
Reader Michael Petersen is no slouch. Seeing our previous post about a mystery elevator, he sprang into action. The above photo from the Tillotson Construction Co. archive was unlabeled. Nearly every other photo from the collection has pencil notes on back indicating when and where, but not this one. The elevators could help us out with labeling of their own, but they’re mute.
“Saw your post about the unknown elevator,” Petersen writes. “With a little help from AI, is this the one?” He includes the link to a Google Street View image.
Comparing the then-and-now images, we’re inclined to say our friend Petersen scored a bullseye. Everything in the two photos corresponds to records.
Tillotson built a 100,000-bushel main house for the Co-op in 1947. The notes at the top of the first record say “full cupola” and describe four 15.5-foot-diameter tanks reaching 110 feet in height.
A storage annex of five tanks and 100,000-bushel capacity joined in 1949. Another annex of 10 tanks and 200,000 bushels was in 1953. The tanks measured 15.5 feet in diameter and 110 feet high.
That seems to account for all the tanks in the vintage photo. The next thing is to determine is the provenance of the second elevator, seen at far right. An ad in the Sept. 20, 1945 edition of The Helena Star answers it was put up in 1941.
Heavy rains of mid-June 1949 causing flooding and mayhem as farmers tried to start the wheat harvest. On June 16, The Star reported, “Water filled the basements of several homes, as well as both of the grain elevators.”
One assumes that means water filled the basements of the grain elevators, not the concrete tanks. Despite the editor’s vagueness, this news indicates the second elevator was already in place. No telling what month Tillotson built the annex.
During the rainy June weekend, an unthinkable tragedy took place at another Alfalfa County location, an unincorporated place called Yewed, about 20 miles from Helena.
“Freddie Calhoun, who moved recently from Aline to Cherokee to work for that city’s light department, was killed Saturday evening about 5 o’clock when he came into contact with a 220-volt electric wire on which he was working at the Yewed elevator. Another employee, Bob Willis, was in a critical condition Monday in the Cherokee hospital after being electrocuted in the same vicinity at Yewed Sunday.”
Calhoun was said to have been well-known in Helena.
It’s hard to imagine how two such accidents could occur just a day apart at the same location. Things got worse, though. On June 16, the same day the Star published news of the floods and electrocutions, yet another tragedy occurred. David Earl Fowler, a 10-year-old boy who attended school 20 miles away in Nash, Okla., died in a terrible accident. The Star: “He was crushed beneath a truck while he lay asleep under a tree near a grain elevator in Helena.”
It’s well-known that elevators were dangerous places, but Helena is a whole other category.
The archive from the Tillotson Construction Co. has been richly productive for Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, even in this case giving us an elevator and a storage annex that we can’t identify. The elevator in the foreground appears to have a curved cupola that’s typical of Tillotson’s style. It looks like a single-leg main house with approximate capacity of 120,000 bushels.
In the background, a companion elevator of similar capacity reflects a different style of building.
The tanks of the storage annex extending across the left side of the photo could also be Tillotson handiwork, our conjecture being based upon the characteristic manhole covers seen about fifteen feet up from ground level.
Otherwise, neither sign or label, nor an incidental detail elsewhere in the scene helps to identify this elevator complex.
We look forward to the emergence of further information in the hope of making an identification.
Finding ourselves pressed for time after entering southwese Kansas on U.S. 150, we chose Santanta as the most practical destination and had to skip three other locations where Tillotson Construction Co. built elevators in the late-1940s. The three towns–Elkhart, Rolla, and Moscow–were farther south on U.S. 56, and it was too big a detour.
Now from my desk at home in California, I’ve gone into the files and photos for Rolla, a Morton County village of less than 400 people. Tillotson built a 148,000-bushel elevator there in 1948. The aerial photo seen above suggests it was the first reinforced-concrete elevator on the site along the Cimarron Valley branch of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The label on the elevator’s cupola informs us this job was for Rolla Co-Op Equity Exchange.
In 1948, Tillotson built elevators in Manchester, Okla.; Moscow, Montezuma, and Rolla, Kan.; Springfield, Colo.; Polk and Richland, Nebr.; and Cavalier, N.D.
A satellite view shows the Tillotson elevator still standing and evidently in use. In the screenshot above, we see it in the center, distinguished by the ovalized cupola.
The Rolla elevator was built according to the plan already established at Manchester, Okla.
Key specs:
Five tanks measuring 15.5-feet in diameter and 120 feet in height
12 x 17-foot driveway
8 bins over drive, 17 bins in all, no dust bin
15.5-foot spread
Electrical room included
Ext. to roof for grain
1,282 tons of reinforced concrete
20 tons of concrete for hopper
62.3 tons of reinforcing steel
Main slab 49.5 x 46 feet
7,176 tons loaded
Cupola dimensions of 21.5 x 34.25 x 28 feet and topping out at 148 feet high
Pulley centers 151 feet apart, wheels turning at 42 rpm
Boot pulley 72 x 14 x 2 3/16 inches
Head pulley 72 x 14 x 3 15/16 inches
330-foot-long belt, 14-inch cups
More details in the construction record below.
My search for digitized news stories about the commissioning, construction, or completion of the elevator produced nothing. A call to the Morton County Library yielded the information that the local papers haven’t been digitized and rather are on microfiche. A kind librarian has offered to look into past issues as time becomes available. So there remains hope of turning up more information about Rolla and the other southwest Kansas towns where Tillotson built elevators in the late-’40s.
The Great Depression of the 1930s and disruptions of World War Two caused Baca County, Colo. and its seat of Springfield to suffer a population decline of 45 percent. Census data reveal that Springfield had 1,800 residents in 1948, when Tillotson Construction Co. built a massive 250,000-bushel, twin-leg elevator of reinforced concrete.
As observed in a previous post, the mighty elevator followed the standard plan implemented in 1947 at Satanta, Kan.
Since then, we’ve learned that Tillotson formed a rounded cupola in Satanta, possibly the first demonstration of the style that became a Tillotson signature.
A note in the construction record says a primary difference was that Springfield had two radial distributors up high instead of the Gerber Roto -Flo system installed at Satanta.
Integrated into the main house were no fewer than 20 internal bins and a dustbin.
Another note says the job included construction of the office building seen to the right of the elevator. Photos from our June 8 visit show the building little-changed.
If only I’d possessed an aerial drone to take the same shot from the northwest.
What’s particularly revealing about the 1948 aerial photo is the sparsely populated village, as seen on a day when light snow covers the nearby fields. The new elevator dwarfs two neighboring wood elevators. The water tower, previously the tallest structure, is no longer so impressive.
And why were there no trees? Springfield was founded by Windsor Town Company in 1887. The tree-planting trend evidently took hold after 1948.
Springfield’s population has continued to dwindle. The town’s website claims 1,375 souls in 2020. It’s part of a general decline of population in towns and villages of the Great Plains.
The elevator and storage annex now rise from a leafy setting. With its cupola, the elevator reaches 160.25 feet, far higher than any tree that will endure the gales. Springfield is 139 years old, but at the current pace, I wonder if the bicentennial in 2087 will find just the elevator outlasting the people and their trees.
Editor’s note: I found this old story and photo for the Toledo Blade in my files–my first attempt to apply a poetic touch to a grain elevator.
In a bay where grain hulls and residue fire out of a chute, a 43-year-old Reo Gold Comet crouches behind its own long snout, awaiting the next call to duty.
A coating of dust on the cab gives the truck a ghostly look. The blue paint on the hood needs to be polished, and the chromed grille hardly sparkles. One windshield wiper is missing, and a door won’t open.
But the dump box still goes up and down in back, which is the main concern of Charlie Steffens. That and the fact that the flathead six-cylinder engine still runs.
“There’s a lot of spit and sputter in it,” says Mr. Steffens, co-proprietor of Atlas Feeds. “But it runs good. You just have to use a little more choke than usual.”
Mr. Steffens bought the truck “a couple of years ago for $600 or $700” from a man in Tecumseh. The seller had to choose between the truck, which he intended to restore, and his wife, who presumably suffered from a little neglect of her own.
Once Mr. Steffens got the Reo to the feed mill, he was promptly offered more than the total purchase price for the hydraulic hoist alone. He wasn’t interested; the truck was too useful as a utility vehicle, with its main function being the disposal of leftovers from the milling process.
The sour-faced truck holds a certain appeal for customers. They pass it on the way inside the store for hardware items or a packet of seeds. Most people ask the truck’s age, Mr. Steffens says, although some may remember it as the truck whose brakes “cut loose,” injuring a former owner.
But around the busy mill, there’s neither time nor energy to imbue this everyday object with exotic qualities.
“We’re just a country elevator,” Mr. Steffens says.
As described in an earlier post, we visited the Tillotson elevator in Satanta, Kan. at sundown on June 8 and found our subject jubilantly aglow with a cloak of soft pink against the sky’s fading cobalt.
Tillotson Construction Co. built the twin-leg elevator as part of its Class of 1947. It was a 250,000-bushel undertaking in the same year they built elevators in Minneapolis, Kan.; Dalhart, Tex.; Rushville, Nebr.; and Helena and Eva, Okla. It was only exceeded in capacity by the 265,000-bushel classmate 100 miles away in Gruver, Tex. Tillotson had already built a 350,000-bushel elevator in Farnsworth, Tex. in 1945. The Class of ’47 nonetheless comprised the latest and greatest achievements for the Omaha company that had formed only nine years and one World War earlier.
It’s worth keeping in mind, as contributor Brad Perry informs me, there was need for greater storage capacity as elevators were situated farther and farther from shipping terminals to the east.
To see Satanta from a distance, while a locomotive scruffed and chuffed along the tracks on a local mission, was a revelation. A rising arpeggio from a string orchestra would have fit the moment.
There was another epiphany to come. After returning home to California in mid-June, I opened the photo file and found a portrait of the brawny new elevator, a gleaming 166.75-foot-tall class president of an elevator.
Windows high in the sky brighten the interior of the substantial, curvaceous cupola.
A note in the construction record says “Round end on cupola not per plans.” The way the story was transmitted by my late-uncle Charles J. Tillotson, the rounded cupola was an improvisation as Grandfather Reginald Tillotson found 90-degree corners unsatisfactory and determined it was easier to bend the formwork around the structure.
Did Satanta provide that moment of innovation?
Triumphant letters spelled out Satanta Co-Op Grain Co. then. Traces of a succeeding label are seen now. It’s a different style, and there’s racy red-and-blue striping on a tank.
The 1947 photo shows the elevator already at work. The 10.5-inch load-out spout is connected to a boxcar. The driveway door is up, allowing access to the 50-ton truck scale that measured 50 x 10 feet. We see snow melting around the lot on a fair day. In the lower left, a 1939 Ford Tudor sedan stands by for action. To the immediate right of the elevator, an arrangement of steel tanks is outfitted with a ladder and crude bridgework for access.
And to the far right, the old wood elevator looks on with awe.
A storage annex came along later, helping to complete the scene we found on that June evening at the start of another harvest. After nearly eighty years, the Tillotson elevator was still proving its worth by serving the Satanta community.
For the final stop on our Utah-Colorado-Kansas road trip leading to Omaha, Neb., my wife and I arrived in Minneapolis, Kan. at 12.00 noon on June 9 expecting to find the 100,000-bushel elevator that Tillotson Construction Co. built in 1947.
Seeking something obvious, we drove right up to the elevator complex at West 2nd Street and Markley Avenue. A friendly gent stepped out of the office and said Chalmers & Borton built the entire complex. Indeed, there were Chalmers & Borton manhole covers on the tanks of the annex. The main house featured a rectilinear cupola that was definitely not in the Tillotson style. We didn’t see any manhole covers on the sides of the tanks.
Then the gent told the tale of a massive fire in the 1990s that started in a feed mill, spread to a large lumber pile, and damaged an elevator next door. The fire department spent three days fully extinguishing the blaze and its last embers. The elevator had to be demolished.
We went to the site he indicated but saw nothing to suggest a former elevator.
Then we had lunch at Papa’s Burger Mill, nursing hopes of being able to track down details of the fire through newspaper records.
Minneapolis, a town of about 2,000 people, is situated just west of U.S. 81 some twenty minutes north of Salina, Kan. An AI overview offers:
“The area became a focal point for European-American settlement after the Civil War. In 1866, Israel Markley built a grist mill on the banks of the Solomon River and laid out the town. Originally called Markley’s Mills, the city was renamed Minneapolis around 1871—a name locals adopted from Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
None other than George Washington Carver attended high school here.
We had met apparent defeat in Minneapolis, though, and left the site without any proof of the elevator that’s in the Tillotson records. Or so we thought. It turned out to be a good thing that I took one establishing shot (top of post) showing the elevator complex from a southeastern vantage point.
To start work on this post, I searched unavailingly through newspaper archives. I called the Minneapolis village office and was referred to the Ottawa County Historical Museum. A woman named Beth revealed that the Minneapolis Messenger has never been digitized. She referred me to a museum advisory board member. I called up Jim Kay, a farmer, who said he’s 85 years old and a lifelong Ottawa County resident. He recalled a bit about the catastrophic fire but said there was never a second concrete elevator in Minneapolis. I sent him a photo from my desktop.
What was all the data from the construction record trying to tell me?
My investigation was heading nowhere until I thought to look through the recently acquired collection of photos from the Tillotson archive. Ta-da! There was a picture of Tillotson’s job. Inscribed on the back is “Minneapolis, Kan. 1947. The photographer’s stamp is B&M Photo Shop, “Everything Photographic,” Minneapolis, Kansas.
I called Jim Kay again. He said the whole question had been discussed at morning coffee. He agreed the photo depicts the same main house that stands today.
“It’s taken from the west side,” he said.
It’s an unusual elevator in the Tillotson catalog. A note on the record says it followed the plan established at Pond Creek, Okla,, but this one went up with “drawform walls thru cupola.” The single-leg elevator has four tanks measuring 15.5 feet in diameter and reaching 125 feet in height. The job consumed 906 cubic yards of concrete and 40.87 tons of reinforcing steel. Another 10 yards of concrete went for the hopper.
Fully loaded, the elevator was rated at 5,000 tons.
I have no idea about the rectangular tower. Nothing indicates it was part of the job. The only other note of significance says “Transfer spout to mill.”
The way we figure it, Chalmers & Borton, came along and modified the elevator, adding a new cupola in addition to building the storage annex.
The main house built by Tillotson still stands on its 41×41-foot slab doing the work it was designed for nearly eighty years ago. Thanks to help from others and a bit of luck, I’m satisfied it survived the inferno and we found what we were looking for.
Here it is, the blue door and lintel that was a signature of Tillotson Construction Co. style from its first concrete elevator in 1939 all the way through the 1950s. This one made a special impression when I visited the Montezuma, Kan. elevator after dark on Monday, June 8, 2026.
The light suggests ongoing activity. Certain townsmen were already suspicious of me and my car with California plates, though, so I didn’t peek inside, didn’t knock, and sure didn’t try to open it.
The worst-case scenario: It would be hard to explain why I fell down the stairs.
