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.