After prowling in and out, up and down, and finding the Ag Producers Co-op elevator at Bushland, Texas, to be spotless and more than serviceable after 68 years, I struggled in the ambitious crosswind and went over the the co-op’s office just to the installation’s north. It’s just north of I-40.
As said before, I had encountered no one. Going through the back door, still, no one. But I went through to the front of the building and saw Bret Brown in his office.
Brown stood up to greet me hear my explanation. I had come to see what Tillotson Construction Co. built here in 1950. The company’s principal, Reginald Tillotson, was my grandfather.
Brown, the co-op’s CFO, wore a short-sleeve plaid shirt. He had a couple of minutes to chat with the intruder.
I remarked on the elevator’s excellent condition and the glistening paint job.
He said the paint was applied after the insurance company issued an imperative to seal cracks and coat the silos and main house.
In fact, he said, it was $160,000 paint job.
Yes, the result is spectacular.
For concrete, though, is paint a good thing? As reader Paul Grage wrote in a comment last week about the elevator in Rockwell City, Iowa, “The elevator is rotten in concrete terms.” Happy news to us is that it remains standing.
“But for how long who knows?” Grage writes. “Another victim of paint.”
There was a reason the builders finished the jobs with whitewash instead of paint.
What’s the difference?
A quick search turns up this definition of whitewash: “A solution of lime and water or of whiting, size, and water, used for painting walls white.”
Porous whitewash allows the concrete to breath. It might also be cheaper than paint. You can mix it onsite, maybe by grinding up Hyundais built in the 1990s. I don’t know. But let’s think about it.
Next in the Tex-Okla Road Trip series: Bushland’s specs.
But the drama of the elevator’s construction might have eluded the Class of 2010.
Indeed, we can hardly count the human cost to building an elevator, or any tall structure, in the early and middle decades of the 20th century.
The year 1950 was a busy one for Tillotson Construction Co. The Omaha outfit (my grandfather Reginald Tillotson’s company) built 25 grain elevators–an amazing number. They were in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. The next year they would build one in Missouri.
While the Bellwood plan was used for five elevators, it’s interesting to note the slight differences in materials used. For example, Canyon took 2,463 cubic yards of reinforced concrete while Burlington, Colorado, also on the Bellwood plan, took 2,436 cubic yards (the exact same amount as the mother elevator in Bellwood and the one in Hartley, Texas, which is coming soon in this series). Rock Valley, Iowa, though, took 2,394 cubic yards.
Altogether, 34 hp was required to operate the leg; the record says two 40-hp Howell motors were installed. Theoretical capacity of the leg, based on the cup manufacturer’s rating, was 7,920 bushels per hour. But the leg operated at an actual capacity of 80 percent the theoretical capacity, or 6,350 bushels per hour.
By Ronald Ahrens
To make it by dawn to the Tillotson elevator in Canyon, Texas, I hit the road at 6.30 a.m. and hightailed out of 
The quality of the Co-op’s operation was evident. The only things with the elevator that seemed out of order was a broken basement window, and one of the back doors had been splattered with glop.
The single-leg elevator built at Hereford, Texas, by Tillotson Construction Company in 1951 had capacity for 300,000 bushels, according to company records. That worked out to 2,640 bushels per foot of height. The drawform walls of the silos, or tanks, rose 125 feet.
On my road trip to visit my grandfather Reginald Tillotson’s elevators, the first stop was Hereford, Texas. It was toward the end of my second day of driving from California, and I arrived in time for late-afternoon light.
Our Grandfathers' Grain Elevators 