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.

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.

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.