The archive from the Tillotson Construction Co. has been richly productive for Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, even in this case giving us an elevator and a storage annex that we can’t identify. The elevator in the foreground appears to have a curved cupola that’s typical of Tillotson’s style. It looks like a single-leg main house with approximate capacity of 120,000 bushels.
In the background, a companion elevator of similar capacity reflects a different style of building.
The tanks of the storage annex extending across the left side of the photo could also be Tillotson handiwork, our conjecture being based upon the characteristic manhole covers seen about fifteen feet up from ground level.
Otherwise, neither sign or label, nor an incidental detail elsewhere in the scene helps to identify this elevator complex.
We look forward to the emergence of further information in the hope of making an identification.
Editor’s note: I found this old story and photo for the Toledo Blade in my files–my first attempt to apply a poetic touch to a grain elevator.
In a bay where grain hulls and residue fire out of a chute, a 43-year-old Reo Gold Comet crouches behind its own long snout, awaiting the next call to duty.
A coating of dust on the cab gives the truck a ghostly look. The blue paint on the hood needs to be polished, and the chromed grille hardly sparkles. One windshield wiper is missing, and a door won’t open.
But the dump box still goes up and down in back, which is the main concern of Charlie Steffens. That and the fact that the flathead six-cylinder engine still runs.
“There’s a lot of spit and sputter in it,” says Mr. Steffens, co-proprietor of Atlas Feeds. “But it runs good. You just have to use a little more choke than usual.”
Mr. Steffens bought the truck “a couple of years ago for $600 or $700” from a man in Tecumseh. The seller had to choose between the truck, which he intended to restore, and his wife, who presumably suffered from a little neglect of her own.
Once Mr. Steffens got the Reo to the feed mill, he was promptly offered more than the total purchase price for the hydraulic hoist alone. He wasn’t interested; the truck was too useful as a utility vehicle, with its main function being the disposal of leftovers from the milling process.
The sour-faced truck holds a certain appeal for customers. They pass it on the way inside the store for hardware items or a packet of seeds. Most people ask the truck’s age, Mr. Steffens says, although some may remember it as the truck whose brakes “cut loose,” injuring a former owner.
But around the busy mill, there’s neither time nor energy to imbue this everyday object with exotic qualities.
“We’re just a country elevator,” Mr. Steffens says.
Maybe we’ve spent too long looking at grain elevators. On the other hand, after visiting Bryce Canyon National Park and seeing the hoodoos and rock towers, we experienced an irrefutable doppelgänger effect when we happened upon the abandoned Osiris Mill and Creamery, a.k.a. Red Mill. The two locations are thirty miles apart within Kane County, Utah. Osiris Mill, named for the Egyptian deity of the underworld, has the requisite ghostly quality and serves as a mysterious double to the park’s eroded formations.
John’s Valley Road, the narrow paved byway from Bryce Canyon City, Utah to the tiny hamlet of Antinomy, follows the east fork of the Sevier River through remote country that hardly promised an elevator discovery, yet we found a mill house and grain storage tanks in an obscure place called Black Canyon.
The wooden structure that adjoined stubby concrete tanks appeared after we passed a series of irrigated alfalfa fields on the plateau. Four tanks rose about twenty-five feet from the canyon floor. They were creased at regular intervals and seemed to indicate a type of construction other than the familiar slip-forming of our prairie and Great Plains elevators. The outer surfaces of the tanks were pleated, so to speak, and I had the impression they were made of precast concrete and joined together by mortar. The place was fenced, though, so it wasn’t possible to get up close. My guess is that, because the tanks aren’t so tall, a lower load-bearing rating meant this manner of construction produced a result sufficient in strength. Additionally, it’s hard to imagine a continuous-pour operation in such an out-of-the-way place.
In the central space between them, the four tanks supported a generously proportioned superstructure, which I’d otherwise call a run, and a ramshackle cupola.
I stepped out of the car for pictures but found it unnerving to have the absolute stillness broken by intermittent blasts from a medium-bore rifle. It seemed a safe bet the target wasn’t a grain-elevator blogger, though. Anyway, it’s illegal to shoot across a road, isn’t it? So I went ahead with the photos. It was around five o’clock, and the ruins were harshly backlit.
Returning afterwards to the car, I drove away hoping to find details about this attractive hybrid building, part grain-storage facility and part mill.
In no more than ten miles, my wife and I came to the tiny Garfield County hamlet of Antimony, pronounced AN-ti-MO-NEE, which takes its name from a “metalloid element” that’s useful as an alloy and in the making of semiconductors.
The name Antimony definitely doesn’t suggest a grain trading capital. The town is said to be so remote that it was the last in Utah to get electricity.
Nothing was moving except for a sturdy-looking man doing landscaping chores at Antimony Community Center.
“Oh, that’s Red Mill,” he said when I described the subject of my investigation. There used to be dryland wheat farming where the alfalfa is now, he said. The wheat growers gave it up after the Drought of … he couldn’t remember but reckoned the flour mill was last used sixty years ago.
Red Mill, more properly called Osiris Mill and Creamery, was built by William F. Holt, a major figure in western development projects. When he died in 1951, The New York Times declared, “WILLIAM HOLT, 87, BUILDER OF TOWNS; Developer of Resources of the Imperial Valley Dies–Work Formed Basis of Novel.” Or as the Garfield County News summarized: California’s Imperial Valley benefited from Holt’s touch.
Holt first came to Garfield County from his home in Hollywood, California in 1923. The County News lauded him:
“He was the real father of the Imperial Valley, starting work there in about 1900, at a time when there was neither water nor people in that entire country, its only inhabitants being horned toads and Gila monsters, and the turkey buzzards and crows all carried canteens.”
The News reported Holt’s initial development had started at Widstoe, namely, a power plant, a creamery, and Holt “expected to have a flour mill running in the near future.” He was president of Garfield Land Company, which operated out of a Los Angeles P.O. box. In 1926, Holt received permission from the Utah State Engineer’s Office to divert water from the east fork of the Sevier and fill a 3,000-acre-foot impoundment. The water would be used to irrigate 1,600 surface acres. Holt liked to go on about how California was becoming overcrowded and needed to import food — “everything that is suitable to be raised in this part of the country,” according to the News. He pushed for a new road between Widstoe, where his own fields were, and Escalante so that farm produce could more easily reach the Union Pacific line at Cedar City, arriving the next night in L.A.
Osiris Mill served as a granary and creamery at the now-defunct town of Osiris, named for the Egyptian deity who lorded over the underworld while also representing fertility and agriculture. Ruins on the other side of John’s Canyon road indicate the remains of Osiris. Widstoe is also characterized today as a ghost town; it was up on the plateau where I saw the irrigated fields. Widstoe and Osiris were separate by fifteen miles, and it seems safe to assume the flour mill and creamery referred to in the newspaper were the same relic we visited despite not being located at Widstoe.
Henry Bell Wright, the first American novelist to make $1 million, modeled a character on Holt in The Winning of Barbara Worth. Wright’s novel became a silent movie starring Ronald Colman, Vilma Bánky, and Gary Cooper. This Western flickered before the public in 1926, the same year the Utah Engineer’s Office awarded irrigation rights.
While time itself seems to stand still in this part of Garfield County, a full century has elapsed since the movie’s release.
The Osiris Mill and Creamery was well-crafted, which makes today’s overgrown site especially regrettable.
Despite the gunfire, our discovery of Osiris seemed heaven-sent. Even though it’s not one of Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, we’re pleased to shine the spotlight once again on this remote wonderment.
So far, it’s impossible to explain why a photo of a tractor dealership was included in the archive of Tillotson Construction Co. We await further illumination.
Newspaper searches first reveal Troth Tractor & Equipment Co. in 1946 in Omaha. The dealership offered an integrated approach to farming. A classified ad in the World-Herald advises readers: Troth Tractor and Equipment, Authorized Ford-Ferguson Sales and Service. 2515 O St., MA 7958
Henry Ford and Harry Ferguson collaborated on the Ford-Ferguson 9N tractor, examples of which are seen here. This was around the same time that Raymond Loewy and Associates, of New York, designed the new Farmall for International-Harvester.
Wood Bros. Pickers (see sign) refers to the Wood Brothers Thresher Co.’s single-row corn harvester that the tractor towed along. Picked corn would be lofted into a wagon that trailed the picker. Wood Brothers was founded in Minnesota in 1893 and moved to Des Moines in 1899. A Facebook post provides further information:
Wood Bros. Thresher Company marketed their corn pickers on their own and then sold to the Harry Ferguson Co., a part of Ford MotorCompany.
WHY PAY CASH? asks Troth in this 1949 ad.
New improved Ford tractors and Wood Brothers pickers cost you less per acre and mean more income. Buy your new improved Ford tractor, Dearborn equipment, and Wood Brothers corn picker now. Up to 2 years to pay. Very low budget rates. A farm plan to fit your every need. Let the Ford tractor pay its own way and keep the profit in your pocket. We are easy to deal with. See us today. Omaha’s Ford Farming Headquarters.
The Dearborn Disc Plow and other implements were produced by the Dearborn Farm Equipment, agriculture division of Ford Motor Co. Note the neon sign in the showroom’s plate glass.
H.B. Smith, next door at 2517 O St., also appears to be a postwar addition to the O Street tableau.
To repeat, we can’t explain this photo. But if you told us that it was included because Uncle Mike Tillotson loved Ford Motor Co. so very much, that would be good enough.
A representative of CL Construction, of Lincoln, sends this aerial photo and reports “huge strides in the demolition of the grain elevators at 3001 Cornhusker Hwy. in Lincoln.” News of the project first broke late in 2024. The demolition site will be offered for redevelopment.
Lincoln’s 10/11 News visited early in 2026 for an update. Comments on the channel’s report range from sublime to ridiculous. These are unedited for style or factual correctness.
Sublime:@dougnagel1155 “What weird comments. It’s just time to move on. When I was a kid hauling grain to this elevator, it was on the outskirts of town. Now it’s pretty much in the middle of town. Farmers are not bringing the crops to Lincoln like they used to. There’s other elevators north of town that are easier to haul to and avoid city traffic. I’m sure the Lincoln site isn’t profitable anymore.”
Ridiculous:@VictorianMaid99 “No grain means no food and no food means no people. Planned demolition just like 911.”
Sublime:@danlowe8684 “Those silos were not in ‘disrepair’. They were some of the beefiest structures ever built – and would have been standing for many more generations. They have been working to demolish them for over a year with modern machinery – and are far from done. The silo builders invented slip-form concrete construction in the early 1900s (Buffalo, NY, I believe), and it is used today for bridge and highway construction.”
Ridiculous:@e030396 “Another example of this generations’ toxic mentality (tear-down-functional-structures with out good reason). Looks like a stupid move not considering the increase carbon foot print.”
Sublime:@paulkurilecz4209 “More than likely the conveyor systems were in disrepair. They were not refurbished due to a lack of business.”
Meanwhile, CL Construction has been active elsewhere.
“In between all of this, our team has been down in Sunray, Tex. to dismantle another grain elevator facility,” the spokesman reports.
We know Tillotson built in Sunray and suspect that’s the facility in question.
Note: The white elevator at upper right is a Tillotson elevator from the mid-1950s.
The cache of archival photos recovered from the Tillotson homestead includes an image of a wooden elevator complex, but there are no inscriptions on back of the photo so we have no clue of the location or date.
Close inspection of the image reveals the smaller of the two elevator buildings is labeled. It appears that “Farmers Co-Op” was painted over other lettering, possibly “Grain & Coal.”
The larger building–how about that headhouse!–is labeled Farmers Co-Op Co.
We sure wish we could identify the woman standing on the office porch. She is buttoned up tight inside her overcoat and giving a nice smile.
The car looks like a mid-1930s Pontiac.
There are other markings. We see the numerals 2 and 8 at the extreme left but can’t explain them. Three signs hang on the outer walls of the office. The one the car is facing advertises Semi Solid Buttermilk, a brand of partially dehydrated buttermilk that was used as a livestock and poultry feed supplement.
Brand advertising claimed: “When Sows are fed Semi-Solid they have little or no trouble from ‘dreaded white scours’ among the pigs.”
Ad from The Nebraska Farmer, Feb. 2, 1929
Signs to either side of the woman are illegible, but the shingle under the gable is inscribed Fairbanks Scales.
All the signs would lend the elevator a stamp of authentication: a patron of this establishment could be assured of getting the most advanced and most accurate services.
In general, the whole complex projects a mighty aura, and it’s easy to suspect this was one of the leading operations in its region.
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.
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.
