In the waning light, a doorway leading into the interior of the old grain elevator wants to tell a story. This wrinkled countenance suggests the elevator men who worked here over the nearly 80 years since Tillotson Construction Co. finished the build at Satanta, Kan. Those men patterned their days after the demands of the seasons.
It was matter-of-fact kind of place. The humblest adornments sufficed. NO SMOKING: a stenciled order barely noticeable but strictly obeyed. “Satanta Coop Grain Co., Elevator A” painted neatly on boards now weathered beyond imagining. Words once vivid in red are faded, recalling a distant moment.
The many patches, broken glass, and bare concrete speak of the decades of harvests. And of their dispersion like beams of light into colors.
Who knows how many trucks delivered wheat, how many bushels in all? Some trains stopped, others rumbled by.
The faded portal, squinting back, suggests all of this but reveals no more.
Use this link to see our 2012 post on Satanta and Rolla.
As the evening sky turned to warm pastels and a train slugged along the track on terra firma, we approached Satanta, Kan. in search of the Tillotson elevator built in 1947.
Tillotson Construction Co. records led us to expect a 250,000-bushel, twin-leg main house with eight tanks (silos) measuring 18 feet in diameter and rising 120 feet. The cupola measures 21.5 x 48.5 x 40.25 feet, and tops out the elevator at 166.75 feet in height.
We hadn’t even considered it, but the harvest was just starting and trucks were expected to rumble up any moment. Everybody was prepared to work into the night. An employee saw me prowling around and came out of the office to caution me. Meanwhile, I’d already taken advantage of the opportunity to snap a couple of interior photos.
To allay questions about my legitimacy, inasmuch as possible, I said, “My grandfather built this elevator.”
The Tillotson elevator is 79 years old and has the scars and scabs and prostheses to prove it, but remains in operation for Skyland Grain LLC.
Complete specs for the elevator are found below in this post.
The elevator followed a plan established at Dike, Iowa and included eight internal bins. I looked for evidence of them along with the other marvels inside.
A remark on the records says, “Loading spout out bet. 2 tracks. Roto Flo dist. equipped 1 leg.”
U.S. Route 160 had led us from Springfield, Colo. into Kansas near a town called Johnson City. Continuing on this highway to its junction with Kansas Route 190, we covered the 50 miles to Satanta.
Tillotson built elevators in other southwestern Kansas towns: Moscow, Elkhart, Rolla, Montezuma, and Ensign. We lacked the time to wander to the first three and would only make it to Montezuma in the dark.
There is no record of Tillotson building the storage annex.
After Montezuma, we passed through Ensign on the way to our hotel at Dodge City, checking in at 11.00 p.m., exhausted after a 600-mile drive from Durango, Colo. with stops at several elevators. Then the clerk surprised us with the news that our room was on the third floor and neither of the elevators was working. They still weren’t working in the morning, either, so it came to hundreds of steps with all our stuff up and down and up in the night, down and up and down again in the morning.
On the side trip to Satanta, I should have asked to test the man lift. Despite the age, it probably works just fine.
We use the old construction ledgers kept by the Tillotson Construction Company of Omaha to locate the elevators they built, and when one turns up missing, we have to find out why. Such was the case in York, Nebr. In earlier posts we touched on York, but a deeper dive into newspaper accounts revealed the issues that led to the demise of the Tillotson elevator there.
The York elevator was announced with fanfare in 1951. It was to go up in time to receive the crop that year. On Apr. 11, the York News-Times published a representative image of a Tillotson elevator, and added that six such elevators already existed in rural Nebraska at the time.
The next clue to the fate of York’s grain storage was the collapse of the Farmers Co-Op Elevator in 1990. When I first found the newspaper account, I thought, “Ah-hah–that’s what happened!” Except it wasn’t the Tillotson elevator. This elevator experienced a second collapse a day later, destroying more tanks (silos) while workers attempted to unload the remaining grain. No one was hurt in the second collapse. Remarkably, the elevator was salvaged and continued to serve, eventually surviving the Tillotson elevator.
The fate of the Tillotson elevator was announced in the York News-Times of Aug. 8, 1991, where we found that the “white elevator” was slated for demolition because of severe structural problems. The article noted that the main elevator had been built 40 years earlier, which coincided with the build date of the Tillotson job. No rounded headhouse (a Tillotson signature) is evident in the photograph, but the article leaves no other interpretation, since the elevator that had collapsed a year previously was still in service. Evidently an annex had been added after the main Tillotson elevator was built in 1951.
York News-Times, Aug. 8, 1991
The previously collapsed elevator was eventually torn down also.
So now I know why, as I travel down I-80 at 75 miles per hour, no white edifice looms in the distance as I approach York. As the people involved with the construction of these prairie monuments pass away, we are losing the best witnesses to their beginnings. Few people make much of a note of their endings. So more and more, we rely on newspapers.
We count ourselves lucky that so many of the participants have spoken about their experiences in posts here at Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators. Now we will continue our research as best we can, even in places like York where the elevators are long gone.
Not a Tillotson elevator, I insisted on June 8 as we drove into Springfield, Colo. Well, maybe a Tillotson elevator. Then we pulled up alongside and looked at the manhole covers. Yes, a Tillotson elevator!
We should have known by the curved cupola, but it was hard to see the exact form of it from the distance. That’s my excuse for not recognizing this majestic building.
As one of about 30 branch locations of Pride Ag Resources, the impressive Tillotson elevator in Springfield is mated to a storage annex and looks mighty fine. That is, except for the dryer unit at the back. It’s complete with scaffolding and a little cabin perched on a platform. Lord have mercy on this aesthetic mess!
Tillotson Construction Company’s records include the specs for a 1948 job in Springfield–a 250,000-bushel twin-leg elevator following the standard plan that was worked out the year before at Satanta, Kansas.
Another elevator stands east of Main Street in Springfield. Aside from this quick look, I ignored it in favor of the elevator that’s the subject of the other photos here. Now I wonder if I should have taken the time to visit this one. Maybe it’s the 1948 job listed in Tillotson Construction Co. records.
There’s nothing to suggest Tillotson hadn’t perfected its curved cupola, as exhibited at Springfield, until sometime later than 1948. The manhole covers here are embossed with the words Tillotson Construction Co., Omaha, Nebr., 1958.
The company records, which are incomplete, don’t list a Springfield job that year. It wasn’t unusual for Tillotson to build a main house and a storage annex. The annex usually came later.
Unable to explain the discrepancy between what’s recorded and what I found, I’ll await clarification. Meantime, there are lots of photos to examine.
As we were leaving, a farmer was filling his pickup at the co-op’s pump, and I said hello. He farms 7,000 acres at a location a few miles north of town. The dry winter led to failure of the spring crop, so he was plowing and discing and intended to re-plant in hopes of salvaging a summer harvest.
After the uncertainties as we had arrived in Springfield, it was with a note of triumph that I told him, “My grandfather built this elevator.”
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.
