Author Archives: baggyparagraphs

A Tillotson warehouse, 1,000 bells, and a cat round out the legacy of Peet’s Feeds

by baggyparagraphs

This much is known: Tillotson Construction Co. performed a job for E.M. Peet Manufacturing Co. in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It’s with apparent disinterest, or at best indifference, that the backs of two photos are marked “Warehouse.” No record of the job itself can be located, so we have to guess the date and what exactly was built. A 5,000-square-foot addition was done in 1958 to increase sacking and storage capacity as Peet’s joined the trend of adding bulk-storage bins, six in all. But that small job went to Ranch Construction Co., with Grain Storage and Construction Co. getting the machinery contract. 

The photos suggest Tillotson Construction did a bigger project. We estimate the width of the two-story building at 80 feet. Could 15,000 square feet be too high for the total volume? 

We’re trying to identify the two trucks and their model years, which could be pre-World War Two.

The next best clue for the date of Tillotson’s job is a Peet’s newspaper ad. 

E.M. Peet Manufacturing Co. was founded in 1917 by Ernest M. Peet and W.A. Ruehlman. It was Peet who ran the company as president, making livestock and poultry feeds. Besides their home location at 33 S. 25th St., Peet’s had branches in several states. They also had test farms. 

Pete was a Christian Scientist and belonged to fraternal lodges in the Bluffs. He and his wife Ethel lived at 163 Glen Avenue. Their daughter was Mrs. Dorothy Bammann. Ethel proved to be a ding-a-ling. She belonged to the American Bell Association and collected more than 1,000 bells. She used to drag out her suitcase and pack her dress, the one with bells sewn on it, and go to the ABA’s annual conventions in different cities.

“Everybody comes dressed with bell accessories in some manner,” she told the Daily Nonpareil’s “What’s Your Hobby?” column.  

Ernie Peet was 63 years old when he died Dec. 10, 1944—a shock to the community. More than 500 people including 75 of his salesmen attended the funeral, and there were truckloads of flowers. The Daily Nonpareil lamented: 

The death of E.M. Peet has left Council Bluffs without one of its best established and well-known business leaders. His loss will be felt for a long time.” 

The revealing newspaper ad we referred to ran on February 11, 1945.

Until Reginald Tillotson speaks from his own grave, we have no way of pinning down whether the warehouse was done in Peet’s lifetime, but it’s interesting that the archival photo (top of post) matches the photo of Peet’s operation in the ad. All this indicates an early job for Tillotson Construction, one they finished well before Ernie Peet’s death.

Peet’s was big enough that its sales staff would congregate for special presentations on the latest advances. In 1951, for example, a group of 75 convened for three days at the Hotel Chieftain and, among other things, heard a University of Minnesota professor report new measures in animal nutrition such as adding Vitamin B-12, select minerals, and even antibiotics to the feed.

All that was for bovine and porcine types. But an amusing anecdote expands the Peet’s legacy in a feline way. 

In 1955, the warehouse cat, Lily, received publicity from a Daily Nonpareil story, which led to her selection as winner of the national Puss’n Boots Bronze Award. (Puss’n Boots was a brand of pet food.) The citation purred: 

Amusing mascot, loyal friend, doting mother—that’s Lily. Born in a manufacturing plant (now raising her family there), this affectionate feline endeared herself to fellow workers by her fondness for riding on the company tractor. No day is complete for her friends until Lily comes riding by. To loyal, adaptable Lily, a tractor-riding tabby, this tribute. 

Letter offers young Mike Tillotson consolation and guidance after Reginald’s death

by baggyparagraphs

Soon after Reginald Tillotson’s unexpected death early in 1960, his younger sons Tim and Mike helped their Aunt Mary Tillotson to wind down the business of Tillotson Construction Co. Mike was 20 years old and serving in the army. We don’t know who the writer was other than to assume he was probably a former employee and is the same referred to in a recent post.

Here again, guidance is offered in regard to Mike’s future.

Dear Mike;

Thanks for your letter of 3/27/60. I was still busy on the job at Pensacola, in fact flew to Mobile on Apr. 4th. We stopped at Tuscaloosa and Montgomery, Ala., enroute to Mobile. I returned to KC on the 6th. What happens there in the future, I don’t know, the financial backing that he (Lapeyrouse) has backed off and in a way I don’t blame them.

Except for shoveling snow (55″) this year, both in the parking lot here and at the house (it has been a nice? winter). Spring is very slow in arriving.

I am sorry to hear about your Dad passing away, he had both his good and bad points as you well know. From my knowledge of him though he would stick to a friend through thick and thin. So far as I was concerned he followed the “Golden Rule”–that is enough for me.

Right now I am clearing up returns on my income tax, keeping me busy for the last few days.

After you finish your hitch, I hope that you will go ahead and get your degree in engineering. You can be a good one.

My best regards to you, Tim and your Mother. I will write you more after I get out of this jam. Might even be in shape when you get out in May to get you a job as steel inspector on the ship at Pascagoula.

On the Bailey job–forget it, I never did believe it. After you left he tried to pull a similar deal on another man (C.E. Grad.) and darn near got his ears knocked off.

Sincerely, Tom

P.S. Delayed due to income tax returns

Away from the office, Reginald and Mary Tillotson rode horseback amid the piñons

by baggyparagraphs

Laying off from work in their Omaha office, Reginald Tillotson and his sister Mary Tillotson knew how to play, too. Here we see them on horseback, going down a cliffside with three others who cannot be identified. Reginald wore the white hat and ample chaps, Mary flourished the white tie. It was an adventure that Reginald’s wife Margaret would never have attempted. The Tillotsons owned a New Mexico ranch, so we guess this trail’s location is nearby. We’re also guessing the ponies knew just where to stop for the photo, and that’s not only because of the way they’re lined up. Note the marker that’s jabbing into the center of the picture. Lettering stenciled on the arm says “HANDS OFF.” We welcome guesses about it.

In 1958 letter, Reginald Tillotson seeks son Mike’s pencil prowess on new project

by baggyparagraphs

In December of 1958, Reginald Tillotson, president of Tillotson Construction Co., was working on a project in Kansas City, Mo. and was apparently a guest in the office of another company when he invited his youngest son, Michael, to make the 185-mile journey from Omaha and join the team.

Besides the purpose he expressed, it’s interesting to note the intentional jokey misspellings in a midcentury-comix style of writing, namely, “wouldend” for “wouldn’t” and “ketch” for “catch.”

Dear Mike;

I am working here in Beggs office and sure didn’t intend to ask you to do anything I wouldend do in wanting you to come here and help Tom out on these drawings. He really needs the help and any time you want to pack your bag and ketch the train down and go to work here it is OK with me.

I would appreciate it as it will free me to do the things I need to do and I know Tom would rather have you than me as I don’t know a 1-H from a 4-H pencil, etc. He saw what you did here on that sketch for Carrier, Okla. and was satisfied. His son is teaching here at the Finlay Engineering school here and you might want to look into the situation. Tom is the best elevator engineer I have met and has Wayne Skinner beat a thousand miles. You wouldn’t get better schooling.

Your Dad

P.S. You can come home week ends.

The “Beggs office” that Reginald refers to was probably Beggs Engineering, and more is to be learned about that concern and its relationship to Tillotson Construction Co. For now, though, the major takeaway is Reginald’s genial paternal tone and his droll way of praising and encouraging his son.

About five months before this letter, Mike was a passenger in a bad car accident with my father driving, my mother and I in the backseat, all of us flying out of a tiny little convertible, a Nash Metropolitan, in the night on a country road.

According to my mother Mary Catherine, who was Mike’s older sister, he suffered a fractured shoulder and, in consequence, lost his wrestling scholarship at University of Nebraska. From fragmented sources, we piece together the rest of his story. In 1959 and 1960, Mike served in the army. He then returned to Lincoln and attained a bachelor’s degree in education. No career as a schoolteacher or coach followed. Nor a career at Tillotson Construction Co.–it went out of business after Reginald’s death in 1960.

Mike had learned his carpentry skills building formwork for elevators, and it led to his long career as a carpenter.

Rich lode of archival material means Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators will grow

by baggyparagraphs

By Ronald Ahrens

Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators is thrilled to report wonderful news. A benefactor has sent us 36 pounds of records salvaged from the Tillotson homestead north of Omaha. The carton includes five-dozen 8×10 black-and-white photos, most of them nice aerial shots, and many from locations that are new to us. Really? We built a warehouse for Peet’s Feeds in Council Bluffs? Along with all this, there are dozens of rolls of blueprints. It’s enough to keep us at the grindstone for a long time. 

As our more than 300 subscribers know, the Tillotson brothers—Reginald and Joe—founded Tillotson Construction Co. after the 1938 death of their father, Charles H. Tillotson. Reginald and Charles H. had spent years building wooden elevators for Van Ness Construction Co., but upon the death of Charles H., the sons launched their new company. They intended to use reinforced concrete and put up larger elevators.

Reginald and Joe split up in the late-1940s. Joe moved from Omaha to Denver and set up his own operation, but he died in a car accident not long afterwards. Tillotson Construction Co. flourished through the 1950s, building elevators from North Dakota to South Carolina. It also spawned offshoots such as Mayer-Osborn Construction Co., in which Kristen’s grandfather, William Osborn, was a partner. 

We need Carl Sagan to count all these blueprints.
Millet Ville, South Carolina

Kristen Cart and I launched Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators in November of 2011. When our careers would permit, we blogged away and have created more than 500 posts. This has resulted in a small but steady audience. The last three weeks have brought 1,005 pages views, which we think is pretty good. They come from all over the world. We weren’t posting very often in the last few years because we ran out of material. For us, it’s either site visits or archival records that lead to posts. Site visits are tough because I live near Palm Springs–not a single elevator!–and Kristen might not want me to say where but there are cowboys and elk and petroleum.

Things have changed as my Uncle Mike no longer lives in the Tillotson home, which Reginald built of reinforced concrete in 1952. Sorry to say, the home had become what authorities described as a “hoarder’s nightmare.” Pleased to say, the folks who purchased it in 2025 were diligent about salvaging the good stuff. Their shipment also includes my grandmother Margaret McDunn Tillotson’s copy of the Wayne Spizzerinktum yearbook from her Wayne State College Class of 1925. There is a St. Pius X Daily Missal, which is a puzzle because the Tillotsons went to St. Philip Neri; it was my family that went to St. Pius X but I don’t know anything about that book. And here’s Uncle Tim’s Fifth Armored “Victory” Division basic training almanac from his army service in Camp Chaffee, Ark. Inside it, inexplicably, I found a snapshot print of three nuns wearing all-white, and there’s a five-story parking garage in the background.

I called up the librarian at Wayne State, who says he’ll take the yearbook. The army almanac is another question. It has an elaborate, stamped leather cover but the volume sustained water damage. The missal is falling apart. Maybe I will return it to St. Pius X and hope it makes up for my poor performance as a student. 

Charles H. Tillotson

All this is a roundabout way of saying Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators is about to experience a growth spurt, although we’ll see if it’s akin to the growth spurt from wooden elevators that held 20,000 bushels to concrete ones that held 120,000 bushels. Timing is great because our careers are not the hindrance they used to be, so we will be able to work on new posts.

It’s great to have all this source material, but things are pretty lopsided in favor of Tillotson Construcdtion Co. We would love to get our hands on an equivalent archive from Mayer-Osborn and from J.H. Tillotson, Contractor. 

We invite first-time and casual readers to join with our subscribers and receive email notifications of new posts. All should watch this space for a renewed effort in telling the grain elevator story at the most basic level. It’s turned out a richer topic than we ever figured, and now comes this opportunity to groove on it and grow the blog. 

How some wooden elevators in Nebraska were repurposed to produce cattle feed

by baggyparagraphs

Story and photos by Brad Perry

In Nebraska, many of the 12,000- to 18,000-bushel wood elevators got turned into feed mills, mainly for cattle feed. Most of these elevators had a roller mill in the basement and made a decent feed mill due to their small bins. An example from Walthill, Nebr. is seen in the photo above.

Halbur, Iowa mill
Dodge, Nebr.
Oakland, Iowa

In Iowa, this was less common due to more hogs than cattle. Swine feeds tended to be more complex with more ingredients than cattle feed.

Feed mills were still being built of wood in Iowa up until the 1960s.

Quad States Construction, out of Des Moines, Iowa, got started building wood feed mills and then became a major builder of concrete elevators and annex tanks.

A reader’s contribution presents two of the largest–and last–wooden elevators on the prairie

by baggyparagraphs

Story and photos by Brad Perry

When I started with the Omaha Bank for Cooperatives in 1975, my accounts were the co-ops north of Interstate 80. One was Tekamah, Nebr., where Farmers Elevator was in grain and feed. I was told this was the last wood elevator built in Nebraska. 

It was huge for a wood house — 100,000-bushel capacity. I was also told they went with wood due to poor soil conditions. You can still see it on Google Earth. It’s the big one on the left.

Editor’s note: The poor soil conditions may have led to a heavy concrete elevator settling.

This June 29, 1961 article from the Burt County Plaindealer describes the new twin-leg elevator that would soon open with all the modern fittings found in a concrete elevator.

The very last wood house we financed at OBC was for the co-op at Sisseton, S.D. It’s still in use and holds 60,000 bushels. 

I can remember it cost $6 per bushel ($360,000) when a 250,000-bushel concrete house was $500,000. 

Minnesota and North Dakota stayed with wood longer than anywhere else because of their cold weather. They built as much as 250,000-bushel wood houses. Wood is a much better insulator than concrete and does not have condensation issues.

After ‘Burning Down the House’ in Filley, a new elevator went up in nearby Crab Orchard, Nebr.

by baggyparagraphs

For a town that today has just forty-seven people, Crab Orchard sure presented a big footprint. Among other things, the little hamlet on U.S. 136 in Johnson County, Nebraska, about 20 miles from Beatrice, boasted a weekly newspaper, the Crab Orchard Herald. For remodeling needs, the Crab Orchard Drug Co. sold paint and wallpaper, while the Crab Apple Pharmacy carried back-to-school supplies. The Crab Orchard Lumber Co. promoted Arrow Carbolineum, which killed chicken mites in poultry houses after once-yearly application.

As early as Nov. 6, 1908, the newspaper was bragging up the Crab Orchard Telephone Co. for its part in an election-night bulletin-service event that brought national results to “a large and eager crowd” that gathered at the Bank of Crab Orchard. The results were relayed via the Nebraska Telephone Co., of Tecumseh, to the Crab Orchard assembly.

The Herald’s account included a bit of boosterism:

Telephone people all over the United States have heard of Crab Orchard and its telephone system, and we have the word of a man prominently identified with the greatest system in the country to the effect that there is not a more efficient telephone service anywhere than the people of Crab Orchard are getting. 

Could anything more be needed to make a tiny community self-sufficient? The Crab Orchard Grain Co. added what it could to the effort.

We know that Van Ness Construction Co. built a new elevator in Crab Orchard, and because Reginald Tillotson labeled the back of his photo “1934,” we nail down the year. This deduction is supported by a June 29, 1934 update from the Crab Orchard Herald:

The new elevator of the Crab Orchard Grain Co. is fast nearing completion. V.F. Wise of Grand Island, foreman of the Van Ness Construction Co., of Omaha, which is building the elevator, estimates that the job will be completed in another two weeks. The work has given employment to a large number of local men. The elevator, built at a cost of between $9,000 and $10,000, will have a capacity of well over 30,000 bushels. 

It was just over six years earlier, in the spring of 1928, that the company formed.

The Nye & Jenks elevator at Crab Orchard has been purchased by Wm. McNeil of Kansas City, the new owner taking possession immediately. The new business will be conducted under the firm name of The Crab Orchard Grain Co. R.E. Lidolph, local manager, will remain in charge.

We can’t determine when the outgoing Crab Orchard elevator was built. It conducted operations for Nye & Jenks under the motto “We Crave Business and Deal Square.”

Whatever reasons Nye & Jenks had for selling to Mr. Wise may have been compounded by the fact that the company lost an elevator in nearby Filley that April. A group of young people were returning from Beatrice after midnight when they saw “flames bursting through the roof.”

Meanwhile in Crab Orchard, R.E. Lidolph stayed put through everything, and he continued to preside after completion of the handsome new elevator.

On behalf of Crab Orchard Grain Co., he placed a Christmas ad in 1934, writing, “We wish to extend to all our customers and friends best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year.”

Vintage photo shows a Riverton elevator, but what Riverton and what job?

by baggyparagraphs

The latest batch of photos from the Tillotson archive includes this picture of a metal-clad wooden elevator as seen on a bleak winter’s day. The only notation on back of the photo is “1-2,” which tells us nothing. And within the image, we see no sign or object that could help us pin down the location.

Was this a repair job the Tillotsons participated on with Van Ness Construction Co.?

Which Riverton is it? Towns named Riverton are found in Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Illinois.

We can only hope that by publishing the photo, we get a break in the case and someone will step forward with knowledge of the topic.

House with no fame: Clyde Co-Op’s elevator in Salt Fork, Okla. is short on readily available history

by baggyparagraphs

The recent discovery of photos from the Tillotson archive sometimes leaves us with images but no narrative. Such is the case with two photos taken by Reginald Tillotson, each showing different views of the north elevator at the Clyde Co-Operative Association station in Salt Fork, Okla.

The photo with the view of the driveway and dump pit shows the elevator’s south side. The one that’s partly obscured by a rail car is labeled “east side.”

Otherwise, as far as details, we note in the south-side view that the elevator wears some fifteen “fins,” which we assume are like battens that keep the metal sheeting from blowing away. [Editor’s note: See comment explaining that these objects are “anchorages” to add rigidity to the cribbed structure.] These fins are also seen in the east-side view. The hard question to answer is why they’re not found on the headhouse, too. Readers are welcome to contribute comments with their own views on the question.

Other posts in this blog attest to the fact that Tillotson Construction Co. and the Clyde Co-Op were well-acquainted with each other.

We were able to dig up some news–make that a “review”–of operations at Salt Fork, as published on Feb. 7, 1935 in the Enid Events newspaper:

At the Salt Fork Elevator you can always depend on the best market price for grain, just weights and excellent treatment. By adhering to these basic principles they have greatly increased their business. This concern has assisted their community toward prosperity and has helped to improve the conditions of the surrounding territory and they are at your service at any time. 

Grant County Journal, July 7, 1930

Service spells success for any business, and this one thing coupled with the quality of products sold and the high class service rendered may justly be placed the secret of success of the Salt Fork Elevator. 

The Salt Fork Elevator under the able management of Victor Ingraham, is one of the most favorably known and successful concerns of this section. This elevator is in the market for your grain at all times and has the proper facilities to handle unlimited quantities. 

The owners of this elevator have a wide and varied experience in the grain business. They have knowledge that can be gained only by experience and through this are able to secure for their patrons a service not usually found in this business. 

With the reputation for reliability, honest weights and top market prices, it is no wonder that Victor Ingraham has increased his patronage until now the Salt Fork Elevator is one of the largest firms dealing with farmers in this community. He is indeed authority upon grain and its allied lines. 

In this review we wish to extend our congratulations to this progressive and efficient establishment and refer them to our many readers.