By Ronald Ahrens

After Tillotson Construction Co. had built their first three modest concrete elevators on the Goltry plan starting in 1939, it became time to attempt a big one at Medford, Okla.

In 1941 the Omaha company upsized with a 212,000-bushel single-leg elevator in Medford. Tillotson’s records say they also built an identical companion elevator in Thomas, Okla., which had been too far south from my route across the state’s western region and must be reserved for a future visit.

I had just been in Pond Creek; now, on my way out of Oklahoma, I headed north to Medford. “Located in a wheat-growing region, Medford served as an agricultural trade center with a flour mill and several grain elevators,” Wikipedia reports. “By 1909 the local economy supported three banks and three weekly newspapers.” 

The elevator complex run by Clyde Co-op Association loomed on the horizon. This would be the last stop on my road trip–the 20th elevator in all. (I haven’t even mentioned stopping in Tucumcari, N.M., the very first site visit even before reaching Canyon, Tex.; that elevator had manhole covers embossed with the name Bleater Construction, of Amarillo.) I’d learned by now not to jump to the conclusion about what I was seeing.

The south elevator, foreground, merits the adornment of wheat stalks. 

Indeed, here were two elevators and a storage annex at 567 Hwy. 81. So which one was the House of Tillotson? Turning to the company records, we find the ’41 giant had eight tanks, or silos, of 15.5 feet in diameter that rose 120 feet from the loamy earth. 

The cupola, or headhouse, towered further, being 21.5 feet wide, 48.5 feet long, and 33 feet high.

The job consumed 1,845 cubic yards of concrete and 82.5 tons of reinforcing steel.

On the scene I met Jacob States, a lanky young native of Medford who had worked for Clyde Co-op for a while but maybe too short a period to have developed a wealth of historical knowledge.

Alas, I came away with no photos of manhole covers from inside either house. I did snap one of a Johnson-Sampson plate on the storage annex.

The south elevator appears to be of the same general style but a larger capacity, and it has the larger headhouse. The north elevator looks as if it matches the dimensions listed in Tillotson records.

This morning, two months after my visit to Medford, I phoned the Co-op and spoke to Jenna, who said both elevators are operational.

I hate to end the road trip reports on a note of uncertainty. What can be told for sure  is that the total cost less commission for the Medford elevator was $41,888.37. The workers received 30 cents per hour straight time and 60 cents overtime.

In all, the job required 25,630 man-hours. Total payout was $11,015.50 for an average of 42.9 cents per man-hour.

The Thomas elevator, being identical, required 836 fewer man-hours (streamlined procedures?) and cost $41,275.28.

The Czech sausage sandwich in question.

Rather than conducting a more thorough site visit, I needed to find a lunch spot and then get going in order to make it to my sister’s house in Omaha before bedtime. Jacob States had said I’d find no fast food in Medford, but he failed to mention Smrcka’s Dairy Shack on the north edge of town. In this one-of-a-kind restaurant I ordered a delicious Czech sausage sandwich and sauerkraut, along with friend and a limeade, for only $8.38.

“Have a nice day. Please come again,” says the sales receipt. I don’t know when that will happen, but indeed I’d like to come back to conduct further evaluations here an about 10 other Tillotson sites like Thomas, which I had to bypass.

By Ronald Ahrens

The morning of Thursday, April 19, was calm in more ways than one. The Ford Ranger that had conveyed me from Palm Springs wouldn’t start. I got a jump from AAA and took the truck to Walmart, next-door to my hotel in Enid. With a new battery, it seemed ready to go, so I headed north out of town. My destination was Omaha, but there were two more Tillotson elevators to visit before I left Oklahoma.

I drove for a half-hour before coming to Pond Creek. The town of less than 1,000 people has an impressive complex of three reinforced-concrete grain elevators and additional storage.

Tillotson Construction Co. built here in 1946 and again in 1950. The first was a 100,000-bushel storage job on an original plan. It had an attached driveway, four tanks of 15.5 feet in diameter rising 107 feet from the ground, and a “standard” cupola (according to the company records) that reached 18 feet in height. This elevator is seen at right in the photo at the top of the page. Another elevator, by what builder I don’t know, lurks behind it. 

The second job was a 252,000-bushel elevator on the plan established at Dike, Iowa, in 1946. This time, there were eight tanks, or silos, of 18 feet in diameter rising 120 feet from the ground. The distinguishing feature is Tillotson’s classic curved headhouse. You see this elevator on the left. 

The big one was open, so I helped myself to a tour and found the 68-year-old elevator operational and good condition. The interior is all elegant contours and secret passages. 

No one had noticed me, so I went to the Farmers Grain Co. office and met Jeff Johndrow, the location manager.

“The earthquakes haven’t been kind to the old girls,” Johndrow said, referring to tremors that are widely attributed to fracking in the area.

Then he tempered his remark by saying, “They’re fine–just some circular cracks, good cracks, not bad cracks.”

While the elevators are “very much in service,” he said they’re beyond their rated lives.

I said I wasn’t aware that the builders had established a life rating.

“The insurance companies certainly have an opinion,” he said.

This sobering revelation made me realize just how precarious is the continued operation of concrete elevators. I’d already seen a few discards on my road trip. It leaves one asking: Twenty years from now, how many of them will be in service?

By Ronald Ahrens

Compared to the big 350,000-bushel, twin-leg elevator that Tillotson Construction Co. put up in Farnsworth, Tex., in 1945, their very first elevator (foreground above), built six years earlier in Goltry, Okla., seems almost demure.

It isn’t hard to imagine the crew feeling their way along on this unfamiliar trip from the depths of the pit up every inch of the 96-foot drawform walls and then to the top of the cupola, or headhouse. Were the men keeping it level as they rose? How precise was the mixture of sand, cement, and water? Was the concrete finishing going well?

An answer to these questions is that this 60,000-bushel, single-leg elevator is still standing 80 years later and doesn’t look too bad, although it hasn’t been operated for perhaps a decade.

At the time of construction, the job required 758 cubic yards of concrete and 32.5 tons of reinforcing steel.

The elevator sat on an 18-inch-thick slab that measured 37 x 43 feet. It covered the pit, which was 14 feet 6 inches deep. The dump grate was 5 x 9 feet and the driveway was 13 feet wide.

Fully loaded with up to 1,800 tons of grain, the elevator weighed 3,532 tons.

The cupola, or headhouse, measured 15.5 feet wide, 31 feet long, and 23.5 feet high.

Looking at the leg, the roomy headhouse and deep pit meant that the pulley centers were 127.5 feet apart.

The first Tillotson elevator, seen on the right here in Goltry, Okla., featured a central driveway, a trait that became common.  

The head pulley was 60 inches in diameter, 14 inches wide, and 3-7/16 inches deep. It must have seemed a marvel in its day. As in pre-war practice, the boot pulley was much smaller–just 18 inches in diameter–and 2-3/16 inches deep. After the war, Tillotson started to use boot pulleys of the same diameter as the head.

The belt that ran over these pulleys was a 13-inch, five-ply Calumet belt with cups measuring 12 inches wide and six inches deep spaced at seven-inch intervals. A 25-horsepower Ehrsam motor turned the head pulley.

No specifications are noted for the man lift other than that it was electrically operated. A 5-horse Ehrsam motor worked the truck lift.

By Ronald Ahrens

I reached Goltry by driving six miles east on Route 45 from Helena, where I had nearly been blown off my feet by the wind.

Goltry is a curiosity. It had its largest population, some 346 people, in 1930. Today it’s more like 250 people. There used to be two Mennonite churches, but only one today. The Mennonites took their name from Menno Simons, who was also the namesake of the town of Meno, which I had visited earlier that day, April 18.

Goltry is also the birthplace of Wally Parks, who went to California and became co-founder of Hot Rod magazine. In 1951 Parks created the National Hot Rod Association, which still promotes drag racing today.

Not incidental to my journey, two grain elevators of reinforced concrete stand in Goltry. The smaller, a 60,000-bushel house, was the first such structure that Tillotson Construction Co., of Omaha, put up. It was a touchstone for me and, really, the beginning of our story. I wish I could have come here first, but instead it was one of the last.

Because I arrived after 7 p.m., everything was closed up.

I yearned to know how they got the job in 1939. Just the year before, great-grandfather Charles H. Tillotson had died, leaving the business to his sons Joe and (my grandfather) Reginald.

Until then, the Tillotsons had built wooden elevators. But Reginald and Joe saw the future was in concrete. Among other things, demand for storage was growing as crop production increased. Concrete enabled the company to build much bigger elevators for their clients.

Nevertheless, even at 60,000 bushels, which is puny compared to later work, it took some nerve to proceed and manage this job. Would it come out straight and level?

Providing evidence that things worked out, they did an identical elevator the next year in Newkirk, Okla., a town about 80 miles to the northeast. Another on the Goltry plan went up in 1941 in Douglas, to the southeast of Enid.

The company completed five elevators in 1941. Grain elevator construction then ceased until Tillotson built one in 1944 and seven in 1945.

Company records from those early days include detailed information about costs. Here in Goltry, the total cost less commission was $21,522.97. Even at the rate of 30 cents per hour straight time, 60 cents overtime, the largest portion of that grand total was the $5,575.24 outlay for 14,000 hours of labor. Based on a 40-hour week, that’s 350 man-weeks of labor.

I wasn’t aware of this as I walked the site. Information about costs was a little too prosaic for the moment. My spirit was soaring as I took my photos, as if I’d reached a sacred place.

I didn’t know who built the second, larger elevator on the site, but it has a storage annex and a manhole cover with Tillotson’s name embossed. I guess they returned at some point.

The Goltry elevator looked in fair shape from the outside–no spalling or significant cracking–but was it still in use? While writing this post I phoned the Farmers Exchange of Goltry and spoke to Carol Jackson. “We haven’t used it in probably, if I say seven to eight years, it’s probably 10.” The bins leak, the leg, the man lift–everything needs repairs, she said.

It would have been better to find the first Tillotson elevator still in use, but at least it hasn’t been knocked down.

In the next post, I’ll share all the specs of the elevator that moved Tillotson Construction Co. into the modern era.

By Ronald Ahrens

When the 100,000-bushel, single-leg elevator went up at Helena, Okla., in 1947, it adhered to the plan first used the previous year at nearby Pond Creek. In the above photo, it is seen on the right. I don’t know who did the elevator with the rounded headhouse.

On the ’47 elevator there was a full cupola, or headhouse, and an  attached driveway. An old elevator, probably a wooden one, existed at the site, and a note indicates that cross-spouts led over to it.

This is a one-of-a-kind instance in the records of Tillotson Construction Co.

Tillotson’s pages also say that 900 cubic yards of concrete went into the job along with 39.57 tons of reinforcing steel.

The 18-inch-thick main slab covered an area of 41 x 41 square feet. Below this deck, the pit was 13 feet 3 inches deep.

Fully loaded, the elevator weighed 4,968 tons.

The drawform walls rose 110 feet and were capped by the rectangular cupola measuring 16 feet wide, 31 feet long, and 28.5 high. Even with four windows on the long sides, the cupola projected a sort of robotic muteness. It accommodated the leg, with pulley centers being 152.16 feet apart. The boot pulley was 72 x 14 x 2 3/16 inches while the head pulley was 1.25 inches deeper.

A 20-horsepower Howell motor turned the head pulley as fast as 40 rpm.

Wrapping around the pulley wheels, the 310-foot-long, six-ply Calumet belt was 14 inches wide. Grain cups measured 12 inches wide and six inches deep at 12-inch intervals.

According to the rating supplied by the cups’ manufacturer, theoretical capacity of this leg going all out was 5,380 bushels per hour. But it operated at 80 percent of maximum, meaning actual capacity was 4,300 bushels per hour. This required 18.6 horsepower.

A 7.5-hp Ehrsam motor operated the truck lift in the driveway, which raised a truck’s nose, causing the load of grain to stream into the pit.

A final note reads, “Pit Depth & Cupola Ht. incr. after final Plans. (Noted above.)” Could the cupola be higher than the listed 28.5 feet?

The extra information is consistent with records on other ’47 elevators. “Pit extra deep for cleaning,” says the note for Minneapolis, Kan., where the 100,000-bushel elevator also derived from the Pond Creek plan.

An identical note appends to the entry for the 150,000-bushel elevator at Dalhart, Tex., which was built on an original plan, and includes the revelation that the cupola height increased by 8.5 feet “due to Annex.”

By Ronald Ahrens

As I approached it from the south, the elevator complex in Helena, Okla., rose from the plain.

No one was around when I got there. I’d left Meno and gone back to the northwest to this little town, which residents pronounce Heh-LEE-nuh. It was established 115 years ago and flourished because of the Arkansas Valley and Western Railway, a short-line road that linked the city of Tulsa to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway.

The line has been in the hands of the Burlington Northern since 1980.

As I drove across the plain between Meno and Helena, it occurred to me that before the late 1930s, no landmarks would have been distinguishable. The monotony of gentle undulation, the occasional wind-blasted tree, and a few huddling houses and farm buildings were all this landscape offered. One would see a church steeple when nearing a town.

Looking east along the tracks at the Farmers Exchange Co-op complex in Helena, Okla.

Then, with relative suddenness, reinforced concrete grain elevators went up in every town, grain castles, towering and enigmatic and 150 feet tall. After the 1950s it was common to have an elevator in view, if not now, then as soon as you came over the next knoll.

I came over the next knoll, and the early evening sun made the Helena elevators resplendent.

They’re operated by Farmers Exchange Co-op (est. 1917). Alas, the office was closed.

What I know is that Tillotson Construction Co., of Omaha, built a 100,000-bushel, single-leg elevator here in 1947. A note in the records says it featured a full cupola, or headhouse and four tanks of 15.5 feet in diameter that reached to 110 feet in height.

The cupola, or headhouse, was 16 feet wide, 31 feet long, and 28.5 feet high.

I think these specs refer to the elevator at the west end of the complex, the one with the rectangular headhouse and four windows in each of the broad walls. This elevator appears to have four tanks.

A manhole cover in the storage annex: “Tillotson Const. Co., Omaha, Neb., The Hutchinson Foundry & Steel Co.”

A Tillotson crew returned in 1949 to put up a 100,000-bushel annex comprising five tanks, or silos, of 15.5 feet in diameter and 110 feet high.

And they were back again in 1953 to erect a 200,000-bushel storage annex with 10 more tanks of the same measure.

But what about that second elevator, the one with the curved headhouse on the north face? It has many of Tillotson’s hallmarks, and the Co-op seemed to like to call on Tillotson Construction Co. for its new jobs.

In case of an emerging answer, an update will be posted.

By Ronald Ahrens

In previous posts I’ve observed that the 152,000-bushel elevator at Meno, Okla., seen at right in the above photo, was adapted from 1950 drawings for Tillotson Construction Co.’s job at Imo, Okla. This plan was also used the same year in Clifton, Kan.

What prompted Tillotson’s designers to pull out the Imo plan again in August of 1952 for the job completed in 1953 is unknown.

I had also found a second, newer Tillotson elevator at the site. There is no mention of it in the records that extend through 1955. Site manager Matthew Thomsen speculated it came into being in 1956. (Tillotson Construction Co. stayed in existence until Reginald O. Tillotson died in 1960.) With capacity of about 310,000 bushels, it’s more than double the size of the older house.

The smaller elevator was nevertheless a large structure, consuming 1,519 cubic yards of concrete (plus another 17 yards for the hoppers, which were not reinforced). It also gobbled up 68.88 tons of reinforcing steel. 

The 21-inch-thick main slab covered an area 54 x 51 feet. It sat over a pit that was 15 feet 9 inches deep. The pit was dug by hand. A soil map of Oklahoma appears to show that Meno sits on deep, loamy soil, so the excavation might not have been a terrible ordeal for the crew. In places with caliche soils, the excavating would have to be done with dynamite.

When the tanks were fully loaded, the whole shebang weight 8,397 tons.

The cupola, or headhouse, measured 22.25 feet wide, 42.5 feet long, and 26.5 feet high. In 1953, Tillotson also created headhouses as high a 46 feet at Cherokee, Okla., and 49 feet at Estill, S.C. Nevertheless, the pulley centers were spaced 152.6 feet apart in the leg.

This single-leg elevator had a six-ply, 14-inch-wide belt with 12-inch-wide, six-inch-deep cups spaced at nine-inch intervals.

Plan for the larger elevator at High Plain’s Co-op’s larger Tillotson elevator.

The head pulley was 72 x 14 x 4 7/16 inches while the boot pulley was 72 x 14 x 2 3/16 inches. It turned at 42 rpm thanks to a 40-horsepower Howell motor.

Theoretical leg capacity was 7,500 bushels per hour; actual capacity, calculated at 80 percent of theoretical, was 6,000 bushels per hours and used 27.75 horsepower.

A 1.5-hp Ehrsam motor operated the man lift while a 7.5-hp motor powered the truck lift.