Photo by Kristen Osborn Cart
Photo by Kristen Osborn Cart
Farmers’ Elevator Guide, September 1951
Photo courtesy of Farmers Elevator Coop Association
Farmers’ Elevator Guide, August 1951
Later additions were made to the original structure, increasing storage capacity by hundreds of thousands of bushels.
Mr. MrCroden said the elevator at Roggen, Colorado, bears many similarities to Big Springs.
Additional note: We don’t know why Hastings, Nebraska is given as the location of Tillotson Construction Co., which had its headquarters in Omaha.
Paullina elevator complex, Dec. 9, 2009, by Jim Hamann
Farmers’ Elevator Guide, June 1949
Photo by Don McLaughlin on April 11, 2010. Click on the photo to visit his photostream.
DALLAS CENTER–Work has started on a 250,000-bushel concrete elevator for Dallas Center Farmers Cooperative Company. It will be 166 feet tall and is being built by Tillotson Construction Company at a cost of $151,000.
Located west of the firm’s south elevator, it is 56×70 in base dimensions.
Aeration equipment will be included in each of the ten 23,000-bushel bins, Manager Don Brown reports.
Farmers’ Elevator Guide, circa September 1955
Photo by Pete Zarria, April 1, 2011. Click the image to visit his photostream.
See another recent images from Dallas Center:
Photo uploaded to KCCI in 2009 by the station's u local contributor hmuench
Boxholm, Iowa–Manager Bud Lane reported that the new 200,000-bushel Farmers Cooperative Elevator Company’s concrete elevator will be completed on July 15. Tillotson Construction Co. of Omaha is the builder.
The structure will rise 150 feet with storage tanks standing 120 feet high.
The firm will have 256,000 bushels of space with the new unit.
Farmers’ Elevator Guide, 1954-1955 library volume
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Note: The Boxholm Farmer’s elevator was founded in 1900, according to a 2004 article in the Dayton Review. On October 25, 2004, the elevator–now expanded–took in 145,422 bushels of grain, the new single-day record at this location. For the entire 2004 harvest season, more than 2 million bushes were taken in.
On November 16, 2009, two workers were injured when a grain dryer exploded at the Boxholm elevator. See the report from Des Moines station KCCI.
Boxholm is in northwestern Boone County, Iowa.
When I was out to Nebraska with the kids to see my Mom and Dad in 2011, we took the long way home to Illinois and stopped at Blencoe, Iowa, to see the grain elevator.
Dad helped to build it with Grandpa and Mayer-Osborn Company in the summer of 1954, just as he was starting his last year of college.
Blencoe is a tiny Monona County town of about 200 people. It’s just off Interstate 29, halfway between Council Bluffs and Sioux City.
In March of 1954 Mayer-Osborn won the contract from Blencoe Co-operative Company, worth $153,000, to build the 259,000-bushel facility. It featured a stepped, rounded headhouse.
Dad and his brother Dick laid the rebar during the concrete pour as the elevator went up. Dad had to go back to school before construction was finished because football practice was getting under way.
On my visit, I stopped at the office, where they had a notebook with the fifty-year history of the cooperative. They were proud of their elevators at Blencoe, and the folks there showed me around. 
This elevator is very similar to the elevator Grandpa built in McCook, Nebraska.
Photo by David Wilson
Contracts for new elevators at Aurora and Murphy were let by the Aurora Cooperative Elevator Co. The Aurora 250,000-bushel concrete elevator will be built by Tillotson Construction Co. of Omaha. The 33,000-bushel plant at Murphy will be erected by Black, Sivalls & Bryson, Kansas City, Mo., bolted steel tank construction company. The cooperative has a government contract to store grains for three years and the elevators must be completed by September 15 to meet terms of the contracts. The Murphy elevator will be in use by mid-July.
Farmers’ Elevator Guide, July 1950 
By January of 1955, it was reported that the co-op was operating a new, 271,000-bushel addition built by Tillotson, bringing overall capacity to 551,000 bushels.
Complete Service: Minnesota Equity Elevator Builds to Fill Area Needs
Tillotson Construction's Bill Russell, far right, instructs (from left) Stanley Kittleson, Adrian Dahl, and Merlynn Nelson on operation of the elevator's distributor controls.
Moving quickly to establish itself as the principal district elevator for grain handling, the Farmers Equity Elevator Co. of Montivideo, Minn., has a new 100,000-bushel capacity concrete elevator in full operation after a whirlwind effort to get it built to meet needs of the fall harvest.
When it became apparent that existing facilities in the area left room for a vast expansion to handle grain crops, the Farmers Equity Elevator Company decided to expand its plant which had only 25,000 bushels of capacity.
The project, begun late in August, was rushed to completion by Tillotson Construction Co. of Omaha, Neb, in record time. Concrete pouring by round-the-clock crews was completed in nine days and four hours. This bettered by 18 hours any previous accomplishment for an elevator of this size.
The structure is 102 feet high and has a cupola 29 feet high. It has 17 bins.
Installed during erection was a $15,000 corn drying plant and, on the midway level, a $10,000 grain cleaning installation. This included a large Crippin sieve machine, a large Superior cleaner, a Slurry grain treater and other equipment.
The new building houses a weighing and sampling room but the offices of the company are in the old quarters.
Sliding tubular forms were used to permit the rapid construction.
The plant cost $120,000 including $10,000 for piling costs, but other equipment raised the total to $134,000. Features include a 50-ton, 50-foot long scale with lighted dial and printomatic type registering beam. It has two concrete elevating legs each with 30 h.p. head drive and elevating capacity of 5,000 bushels per hour dumping into a Gerber distributing system. Its dump pit has two sections each built under the driveway and extending 12 feet below ground. All bins are hoppered to discharge into pit.
Two large cleaners installed are a Superior cylinder subterminal size machine for coarse grains and a Crippin screen cleaner for flax. All grains will be commercially cleaned before loading out to add profit to operations. The mills can be adjusted for farm seed cleaning in spring months. Gravity is used to feed mills from above and to distribute grain into bins below before loading to cars.
A 400-bushels-per-hour new type Campbell corn dryer was installed at a cost of $15,000. Some 50,000 bushels of the government loan 1949 corn crop were taken in and dried.
The new elevator was dedicated Dec. 29 with President J.W. Evans, also president of the American Soybean Association, presiding.
Our Grandfathers' Grain Elevators 