The walkout door on a grain elevator seems to be only a minor detail, but as a means of indicating lineage of elevators, it’s as important as a person’s nose. We say a girl has her mother’s or father’s nose, and the same for a boy.
Looking at the door pictured above, from the Mayer-Osborn elevator in Pritchett, Colo., we note the resemblance to walkout doors on Tillotson elevators going back to Goltry, Okla. in 1939, Tillotson Construction’s first concrete elevator.
The door in the photo below is from our 2018 visit to Goltry.
There are two common characteristics.
First, note the lintel above the door in each photo. A lintel is defined as “a horizontal architectural member spanning and usually carrying the load above an opening.” Every Tillotson elevator we’ve seen has a lintel above the walkout door. When William Osborn worked for Tillotson Construction Co., he absorbed this design detail, and presumably carried it west when he got into business in Denver. We see it repeated in the topmost photo, taken at Pritchett, Colo.
The second characteristic is the door’s blue color. At Pritchett, the weathered and time-worn door barely has some remaining blue. Goltry’s door, which would be about a dozen years older, held up comparatively well, color-wise–and there’s also some blue beneath the lintel.
Just a couple of details worth sharing to make the study of elevators richer.
We find notice of a $4,000-mortgage at 6% granted to R.O. Tillotson and wife (Margaret Irene) by The National Company, which appeared July 22, 1939 in The Daily Record, of Omaha. A record published in 1940 gave their address as RD 2, Omaha, which we take to mean Rural Delivery Route 2.
The Tillotsons formed Tillotson Construction Co. in 1938, and the company built its first reinforced-concrete elevator in 1939, the year of the mortgage. By then, the fifth of six children was entering the picture.
A 1937 ad in The Daily Record explained that The National Company was formerly known as First Trust Co. and had an office in 500 First National Bank Building. Built in 1917, this was the first high-rise in Omaha.
From earlier records, we know Charles H. and Rose A. Tillotson lived at 624 N. 41st St. Reginald and Margaret may have lived with them for a time.
It figures that this step in 1939, when they already had a swarm of kids, launched Reginald and Margaret into home ownership in a period when credit was tight. Ultimately, they built their dream home on a knoll in the Ponca Hills, north of Omaha.
My blogging partner Ronald Ahrens posed a question for our readers. Where in the world was this old elevator shown above on the right? Like most wooden elevators from the early days, it was likely demolished years ago. After a productive internet dive, one of our loyal readers, Suzassippi, found the answer. I combined the elevator picture she found with our mystery image to compare the two.
The earlier photo was clipped from an image posted in Suzassippi’s comment. It shows horse-drawn wagons and an ancient elevator. The caption identifies the site as Pocahontas, Iowa, from the early 1900s. The two images above were photographed from slightly different vantage points, but they look uncannily alike.
You can see that a few details had been altered by the time the later photo was taken. For one thing, the 1930s-vintage car was a giveaway. Plainly, many years had intervened since the earlier image. You can see that a chimney relocated from one side of the scale-house to the other, a bay window was added, and an intriguing alteration to the roof line occurred just in front and to the left of the vehicle. I puzzled and puzzled over that oddity–the roof had been changed, but I couldn’t figure out how it fit with the existing roof line. Perhaps the perspective made it appear to attach at an impossible angle. Maybe it’s just me.
The doors to the driveway appeared unchanged, swinging outward rather than rolling up. The structure directly in front of the car was the scale-house, adjacent to the covered driveway, where the telltale roof line and window locations appeared to be just so, except for where the roof was extended. Finally, the painted lettering on the elevator closes the deal. Much faded, it was still precisely where it appeared in the earlier photo, years before. Undoubtedly, our mystery elevator was located in Pocahontas, Iowa.
That leaves us with the question of why the elevator photo was found with the Tillotson archive. If the family was involved with the building, renovation, or demolition of this particular elevator and its associated buildings, we have no proof of it. However, this item from the Pocahontas Record Democrat of Oct. 3, 1940, may give a clue:
We know Van Ness Construction Company was headquartered in Fairbury, Nebr. before 1917, perhaps early enough to have built this old elevator. But they were involved with many other aspects of elevator construction and destruction, so we don’t know, and nothing yet explains the later photo. Was this the old elevator that Tillotson Construction Company replaced in 1940?
Tillotson Construction Company of Omaha built a new elevator of reinforced concrete in Pocahontas in 1954, when it splashed across newspapers in all of its slip-formed concrete glory. Charles J. Tillotson “walked the plank” during the construction. Evidently, the Tillotsons had a long standing connection with the location, but we have not teased out where this old wooden edifice fits into the timeline.
Pages 3 and 3A of the Tillotson Construction Company’s construction record duplicate pages 2 and 2A from a previous post, but these are the complete scans of full long pages. The extra information concerns Cavalier, N.D.; Richland, Nebr.; and Montezuma, Kan.
Pages 2 and 2A of the Tillotson Construction Co. record of concrete elevators cover jobs in 1947 and 1948. The pages start at Minneapolis, Kan. and extend to Polk, Nebr. The jobs range in size from a 31,360-bushel mill building at Minneapolis, Kan. (in addition to the 100,000-bushel elevator) in 1948 to a whopping 265,000-bushel elevator with 125-foot drawform walls in Dalhart, Tex.
Page 1, which started the record in 1939, included cost information, but those figures aren’t included here.
Locations represented in these records are Minneapolis, Kan.; Dalhart, Tex.; Helena, Okla.; Eva, Okla.; Rushville, Nebr.; Satanta, Kan.; Gruver, Tex.; Moscow, Kan.; Manchester, Okla.; Springfield, Colo.; Rolla, Kan.; and Polk, Nebr.
Be sure to look at the bottom of p. 2 for notes on adverse weather and other challenges that factored into these jobs.
Tillotson Construction Co. was one of several organizations that welcomed Nixon Truck Grain Market at 27th and O Streets in a Dec. 1, 1938 Omaha Daily Journal-Stockman ad. “Let good construction and equipment increase your profits,” the Tillotson ad line advised.
Just 30 days later, another paper, The Daily Record, carried the brief notice of a leasing agreement between A.A. Nixon & Co. and Tillotson for machinery and equipment. Value of the lease was $1,808.24.
With questions on why a prosperous company like Nixon would lease, we tabbed Brad Perry, who’s a good friend of Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, to explain. Brad has had a career in finance, which he described in an email:
With the Farm Credit meltdown of the mid 1980’s, the 12 District Banks for cooperatives merged with the central Bank for Cooperatives, headquartered in Denver. Then it was renamed CoBank.
More history: There were 12 Farm Credit Districts, roughly similar to the Federal Reserve Districts. Each District had a Federal Land Bank with local Land Bank Associations, a Federal Intermediate Credit Bank with Production Credit Associations, and a Bank for Coops (BC). The central bank handled the large loans that exceeded the District Banks for Coops’ lending limits.
All this changed after the farm crisis of the late 1980’s. There are now a total of six District Banks, including CoBank.
I was at the Omaha BC from 1975 to 1987. In 1980, OBC started a consulting company to work with coops in our District, which was Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. At the depth of the farm crisis, I took the consulting company private. I’m still trying to fully retire, but have a couple clients I can’t say no to!
Q. Was it customary to lease machinery and equipment from the builder of an elevator?
A. I’m betting that the elevator’s owner didn’t have adequate funds to pay for everything, so the equipment was leased to him/her. That was not unusual. Why the equipment? It could be pulled out and re-sold.
Q. It looks like individual grain merchants like Nixon monopolized the market in grain distribution.
A. You’re about right on the grain merchants and monopolizing the grain business. The primary one was Cargill, along with the flour millers. Pillsbury, Washburn (Gold Medal), and so on. On the Northern Plains, there was also Peavey. Most of them were in cahoots with the railroads. There really wasn’t any government action that broke them up, but their predatory pricing. That gave rise to farmer-organized cooperatives and locally owned grain companies. The federal government did come in to the grain business in the early 1930s–the Great Depression. They created the Federal Grain Company to buy surplus stocks, i.e. wheat. Some of those elevators still stand and are still in use.
Q. It also looks like we’ll be on the road in a few weeks, and that could lead through southwestern Kansas, where Tillotson built elevators in a string of small towns.
A. On your Kansas trip, southern Kansas has some of the oldest concrete elevators in the country. All were built for wheat. As you know, there are mammoth elevators in Salina, Hutchinson, Topeka, and Wichita–particularly Haysville just South of Wichita. On or within 25 miles of U.S. 81/I-35 are four of the five largest elevators in the world. These are in Salina, Hutchinson, Haysville, and Enid, Okla. All were paid for by Commodity Credit Corporation storage payments.
Q. Besides the bountiful grain production, why are they concentrated there?
A. It was not unusual for wheat to be stored as long as 10 years. All wheat into the “terminals” came in 40-foot boxcars from area elevators. You’ll notice larger elevators the farther west you get. Notice Dodge City. It was too far away from the terminals, so they built more storage locally. You’ll see the same in Garden City, Ulysses, and other southwest Kansas towns.
Here at last we present a digitized page of the Tillotson Construction Co. record the late Tim Tillotson duplicated in 2012. Kristen Cart took the whole load of dupes to a copy center, and her effort leads to a batch of pages to be shared over the next few weeks. In that service, we’ve created a new subcategory of the blog for the records’ easy location.
Tillotson Construction Co. was formed in Omaha by Reginald and Joe Tillotson in 1938. Their first concrete elevator, listed on this page, was a 60,000-bushel job in Goltry, Okla. We visited that location in 2018.
Rose A. Tillotson was widow of Charles H. Tillotson and mother to Joe and Reginald.
The reader will note the company got off to a fast start until 1941 when World War Two intervened. There is a three-year gap until the next job in 1944. The page lists more from then until 1946. The jobs got much bigger–up to 350,000 bushels at Farnsworth, Tex. (Good luck squeezing “Farnsworth” into a narrow column heading!
We visited some of these locations on our 2018 Texas-Oklahoma road trip.
Job sites are written atop the page with the year of construction. Most note which plan the elevator follows and extra information such as location of the driveway or diameters of the tanks. Zooming in splendidly reveals meticulously written entries. Uncle Tim told us the name of the employee who started this record. Maybe it’s in one of our early posts.
A key to reading this table: The left-hand column headed by “Item” lists various specifications such as gross capacity of the elevator and amount of rebar used per cubic yard of concrete in varying locations throughout the structure.
The middle section is devoted to costs (less commission) for labor and materials and even includes a line for state taxes. Only a few of Tillotson’s subsequent records include costs.
The bottom block has more info about total dollars and labor rates. At the very bottom, the notes are ad-libbed. They elaborate mundane points. One, for example, indicates total cost included a scale and office.
All in all, it’s a direct connection to answers on a great many points of Tillotson elevators.
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.
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.
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.
Our Grandfathers' Grain Elevators 