Category Archives: The Danger

Grain elevator construction was dangerous for workers.

Estill established proper S.C. Lowcountry storage as need increased–but it cost a life

by baggyparagraphs
A view of large concrete silos with metal frameworks and structures, set against a grey sky.

Story by Ronald Ahrens and photos by Kristen Cart

Having come straight from the fields, trucks were lined up for half a block, and sight of them and the brand-new gleaming white grain-storage tanks built for Harper and Bowers made J.M. Eleazer catch his breath.

“They shot 107 feet into the sky!” Eleazer, the Clemson University extension information specialist, wrote in his South Carolina newspaper column. “It looked like we were in the Mid-west.”

The Hampton County extension agent was guiding him around the town of Estill in early June of 1952.

Historic grain elevator in Estill, South Carolina, standing 149 feet tall with a capacity of 125,000 bushels.
Burrell elevator of 1951

“And the way oats and lupine seed were pouring in there,” Eleazer continued, “I didn’t doubt that they would be filled.” (Lupines were grown as a cover crop in that part of South Carolina about 50 miles north of Savannah, Ga. 

Tillotson Construction Co. had just finished a 225,000-bushel storage annex to go with the 125,000-bushel elevator built in 1951 by Thomas L. Burrell, Inc. of Indianapolis.

The nine tanks of the new annex measured 18 feet in diameter and reached 108.5 feet in height.

Eleazer’s rhapsody continued in detail:

“The whole vast outfit is practically a push-button arrangement. The grain comes in big loads in bulk. A gate is opened in the back and a hoist raises the front of the vehicle so the grain pours out the back. It falls through a grating into a pit where conveyers get it and take it to the top of the elevators. There it runs through a dryer, cleaner, and grader and right on into the proper storage bin.

A grayscale portrait of a middle-aged man with a serious expression, wearing a suit and tie.
J.M. Eleazer

“Some of the grain and lupine seed was being sold, some was going into the government loan, and some was being stored for the farmers. Each lot was sampled, graded, tested, cleaned and dried, and a simple punching of buttons told it where to go. 

“Such safe storage brings grain, corn, and legume seeds into the full stature of dependable money crops. For, handled in that manner, they become about as bankable a commodity as our friend cotton.”

Eleazer ranked Estill as a leader and an example in South Carolina, where grain-producing areas …

” … had gone about as far as they can in diversifying with such crops until suitable storage and marketing arrangements can be made … there are many farming sections ripe for just such a service now. And a facility like that stimulates such crops a lot. For when a man tastes of that service he has more confidence in those crops as sources of cash.

“You really feel like you are out in the grain belt when you stand and look up to those many great concrete towers.”

By Oct. 30, 1953, after Tillotson completed a brand-new twin-leg elevator of 334,000-bushel capacity, It had ten tanks measuring 18 feet and reaching 120 feet in height.

Eleazer provided an update:

“They tell me that vast facility at Estill has had to turn away grain and seeds seeking storage all along. It stays loaded to the gills.”

Eleazer left out an important detail after his site visit. Perhaps he hadn’t been informed, or perhaps he wanted to avoid the subject.

In 2014, Kristen visited Estill for Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators. She reported: “The histories neglect one of the Estill elevator’s darker episodes. In the ’40s and ’50s, construction safety was not mandated as it is now. In one of the accidents that was all too common for elevator construction, Wayne Eugene Baker lost his life in a fall while working on the storage addition, or annex, built in 1952. For all of the heartache, Wayne helped build a thing of beauty that sustained its neighborhood for many years and still brings economic benefit to its region.

Article detailing the tragic death of Wayne Baker, a 23-year-old construction worker who died after falling from a scaffold in Estill, with information about the incident and funeral arrangements.

Estill, March 19 –Wayne Baker, 23, of Pine River, Minn., who worked with the Tillotson Construction company of Omaha, Neb., was instantly killed Tuesday morning when a scaffold broke and he fell one hundred and eight feet to the ground. The Tillotson company is constructing grain elevators for Stiles M. Harper and Grover F. Bowers of here. The body of Mr. Baker is being shipped to Staples, Minn., where funeral services and interment will be held. 

A scaffold broke! Unthinkable! How could that have happened? A young man lost his life in a preventable accident. Today, there would likely be criminal charges against the company. But back then, it was every man for himself; the mind’s eye didn’t hold even a glimmer of greater precautions.

One wonders if Tillotson Construction made a financial accommodation with the young man’s family. We have no record of that.

Mayer-Osborn used Stran-Steel on 1950 Coors job in Johnstown, Colo.

by baggyparagraphs
Black and white advertisement for Stran-Steel, highlighting its advantages for light-load construction. It features scenes of various construction projects using Stran-Steel, along with details about its strength, durability, and applications in military and civilian structures.

By Ronald Ahrens

After being established in Denver in the late-1940s, Mayer-Osborn Construction Co. sought innovation in methods, which led to use of Stran-Steel in the elevator they built for Adolph Coors Co. at Johnstown, Colo.

It would be necessary to look at the plans for this elevator in order to know more about technique and application, but an assumption is that Stran-Steel was easier to work with than labor-intensive rebar.

The Coors job got underway in the spring of 1950. The Johnstown Breeze announced:

“Preliminary work began Tuesday on the construction of the new receiving and storage elevator for Coors’ Moravian malting barley here. The elevator, which will be of concrete and strang [sic] steel construction, is being built by the Mayer-Osborn company of Denver and will be completed prior to July 1 when harvesting normally is started on the malting barley crop to be received at the elevator.”

Stran-Steel–commonly misspelled as “Strang”–was introduced in the Good Housekeeping Stran-Steel House at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.

An advertisement for the Good Housekeeping-Stran-Steel House, highlighting its design and features. The illustration shows a modern steel house surrounded by greenery, with text discussing its affordability and construction benefits.

The Coors elevator went up on a former stockyards site in the railroad triangle southeast of Johnstown. The area is today known as Colorado Sweet Gold, a slick name for an industrial park.

In that long-ago time, the United States Brewers Foundation sponsored a “Beer Belongs” campaign to encourage beer drinking in the home instead of taverns. Coors was expanding its production of Moravian barley, as recorded by History Colorado:

“Coors scaled up the barley program quickly, enhancing the vertical integration of its operations and further tightening its control over the entire supply chain. A breeding program at the experimental farm the company created in 1949 in the San Luis Valley developed improved high-altitude varieties from the original seed stock … Grain storage facilities were built beginning in the 1950s near Loveland, and in Monte Vista in the San Luis Valley, collecting barley directly from the farmers and storing it until it was needed at the brewery in Golden, where a large new custom-designed malthouse was completed in 1957.”

Johnstown is twelve miles from Loveland.

Once the job got going, The Breeze reported on April 27 that burglars forced a lock at the combination tool shed and office. They stole $550-worth of stuff. Construction superintendent Ralph McAfee said the loss included two large power saws and “numerous” other tools.

Text from a document discussing the benefits of Stran-Steel, including its construction from light gauge strip steel, ease of erection by carpenters, and the compatibility with standard building practices and materials.
Stran-Steel explained in company promotional literature archived by the University of Chicago

We’ve found no further news of the construction or details of the elevator itself, but it was surely finished by September when Mayer-Osborn billed the Johnstown Town Board of Trustees $7.20 for supplies.

Additional searching reveals some aspects of Mayer-Osborn’s nature. For one, the Colorado Grain, Milling and Feed Dealers Association Bulletin reports that in an October 1952 conference, Eugene Mayer served as a member of the Equipment and Engineering Panel. Other members were Curtis Wagner, chairman; D.O. Ferris, Richardson Scale Co., Denver; Ray Barmington, Colorado A&M research engineer.

Mayer-Osborn was community-minded as well. In 1954, the Arvada Enterprise reported Mayer-Osborn’s midget baseball team would play the Lakewood Terrors on July 3.

Another item shows that, as with so many other elevators then and now, a Mayer-Osborn house could the scene of tragedy. The Associated Press had reported on July 18, 1952:

“Charles Myers, 16, of Johnstown was killed this morning when he was buried under a barley slide inside the Coors elevator here. Death was probably due to asphyxiation, but an autopsy will be held to determine the exact cause, Coroner Ross Adamson said. The coroner reported the boy and Bill Freauf, elevator manager, went inside the elevator to run grain into a truck. Mr. Freauf left the bin for about ten minutes and was unable to find the boy when he returned. Rescuers got the boy out about 40 minutes later and a Johnstown physician worked with a resuscitator for two hours in a futile attempt to revive the youth, Adamson said. The youth, a Johnstown high school student, was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Myers. A sister [Marjorie] also survives.” 

It was an devastating tragedy for all.

What became of Mayer-Osborn’s barley elevator is unclear. Photos on the Colorado Sweet Gold website show nothing we would expect of an elevator from that era. Further searches concerning the elevator’s fate turns up news (link here) of an explosion and fire in October of 2005 and a “collapsed” grain elevator. No more details than that, but it suggests an unhappy outcome for Mayer-Osborn’s innovative elevator that met the needs of the Coors company in 1950.

Catastrophic collapse in Albert City, Iowa resulted in 7 dead, 1 injured in 1970

by baggyparagraphs

In our grain elevator studies, we always keep in mind the danger to workers. We’ve reported construction-site accidents, some resulting in death. Never had we heard of anything as bad as the accident at Albert City, Iowa on Friday, June 19, 1970.

Tillotson Construction Co. built a 252,000-bushel elevator at Albert City in 1954. My uncles Michael Tillotson and the late Charles J. Tillotson worked on that job and have shared memories. The elevator was built with eight tanks measuring 18 feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height.

Naturally, the question arises: Did the accident occur at an annex to the Tillotson elevator. No, the Des Moines Register’s photo shows another elevator with two storage annexes.

In any case, the 1970 tragedy hits close to home.

Newspaper accounts explain that the top of a tank collapsed as a crew was finishing construction, and the men–ranging in age from 18 to 49 years old–plunged to their deaths. Another man who was at work in the bottom of the tank was seriously injured. Extricating the victims, who were trapped amid steel and wet concrete, was a monumental challenge.

Des Moines Tribune, Saturday, June 20, 1970:

A Mason City man remained in serious condition Saturday in a Storm Lake hospital with injuries suffered Friday [June 19] when a roof platform atop a concrete grain elevator collapsed, plunging seven other men 130 feet to their deaths. 

Donald Peterson, 48, who suffered internal injuries and shock, was working on the ground inside the elevator when the platform collapsed. He was buried by wet concrete and falling debris. 

The seven dead construction workers are: 

James Jorstad, of Hillsboro, N.D. and his brother Ronald, 23, of Cummings, N.D.; Virgil Buchholtz, 27, of Albert City; Michael McCormick, 18, or Rembrandt; Kenneth Andre, 40, of Fenton; Roger Mitchell, 49, of Mankato, Minn.; and Steven Mangold, 29, of Linn Grove. 

Duane Rasmussen, 32, of Ada, Minn., construction superintendent, said two other workers escaped, 

Leif Rodal, 60, of Oslo, Minn., was on a catwalk leading to an adjacent elevator also under construction, and stayed on the catwalk. 

E. Frank Klahs, Jr., of Rembrandt was on the platform when it collapsed but grabbed the outer edge of the elevator and hand-crawled 30 feet to a catwalk. 

Rasmussen said he was on the ground a few feet from the elevator when the collapse occurred. 

“I have no idea what caused it,” he said. 

Crews from the T.E. Ibberson Co., of Minneapolis have been building the twin concrete-and-steel elevators for the Farmers Co-operative Elevator Co. here since April. The structures are 130 feet tall and 55 feet in diameter, with concrete walls eight inches thick. 

The roofs were to have been completed Friday.

Rasmussen said, “We had poured about 30 yards of concrete for the roof before [the accident].” 

That amount of concrete would weigh more than 60 tons. 

One workman said the “whole platform gave way after beams on one side slipped down and everything came tumbling down.” 

Rasmussen said the men killed in the fall were buried under a four-foot pile of debris. 

Rescue operations were hampered because the only ground-level opening to the elevator was blocked by rubble that had to be removed by digging. 

A call to AgState Cooperative put us in touch with Marc Mears, chief operating officer. He says AgStates runs both Albert City elevators. The Tillotson elevator continues to operate well, and Google Maps shows it looking well, too.

“The facility is referred to as the North House and is used primarily as a place to unload beans during times that most of the inbound truck activity is corn unloads,” Mears says. “This allows the bean trucks to unload more quickly and avoids having to switch one of the pits away from corn at the South House.”

Given the anecdotes of my uncles’ personal experiences, and the catastrophe at the nearby complex, the North House in Albert City is one of the most significant elevators in the portfolio.

Notes on contemporary elevator service in the age of supersized facilities

by baggyparagraphs

By Ronald Ahrens with Brad Perry

By one analysis, the trend nowadays is toward a leaner connection between farmers and export markets. By loading grain-only unit trains at facilities close to home, farmers can avoid the step of sending their grain to terminal elevators in port cities. Here, contributor Brad Perry taps his career in banking and finance to share some reflections on the increasingly large scale of elevator facilities in keeping with demand for more efficient grain handling.

Brad: Through the 1970s, we were still building 250,000-bushel workhouses and 500,000-bushel annexes, with 18- to 24-foot-diameter bins. These were being built by Jarvis, Quad States, Jordan, Mid States, and a few others. That makes me really appreciate the 354,000-bushel houses your family built in 1954. 

Ronald: They built 350,000 bushels at Farnsworth, Tex. in 1946!

Brad: Farmers Coop Business Association, of Shelby, Neb. built maybe the first “corn-soybean” elevator in Nebraska. It had 750,000 bushel capacity, four tanks measuring 48 feet in diameter with interstices. It was designed for export unit-train loading. This was followed by the Tamora-Staplehurst Cooperative (in Seward County, Neb.) building a 1-million-plus-bushel facility. After that, it took us a while, but we figured out that larger bins maybe made sense! Now as you look across Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and South Dakota, you see 105-foot-diameter steel bins of 750,000-bushel capacity and now 120-foot-diameter bins (1.2 million plus). For concrete, Tamora, Neb. is a great example. Hooked to the elevator is a 400,000-bushel tank, a 600,000-bushel tank, and now a 1-million-bushel tank. 

Tillotson’s classic elevator at Pocahontas, Iowa, by Brad Perry

Brad: It’s been much more difficult for Kansas cooperatives to unify for the benefit of their producer-owners. There are several reasons including the terminal grain structure. There is plenty of shipping capacity for trains in Kansas, but it’s at the terminal rather than close to the producer. This has been changing with the new shuttle loaders that have been built in the state. Some of the most significant ones (Courtland, Frankfort, Hanover, Canton) were either built by Nebraska cooperatives or as joint ventures with larger companies.

Ronald: I’m turning to the internet for a definition: A shuttle loader is a high-capacity industrial machine used to rapidly transfer bulk materials such as grain into 100-car freight trains. Here’s the link to a scholarly paper co-authored by CoBank Research Fellow Mykel Taylor of Kansas State University that addresses the question of efficiency.

Brad: I was involved with four grain-marketing LLCs and joint ventures where several cooperatives combined their grain operations into a single license. A central staff did all of the merchandising, set the bids, did the grain accounting and managed grain flows. Net grain revenues were then passed back to the member-owner cooperatives based on bushels handled at each facility. These organizations were AgMark at Concordia, Kan., Team Marketing at Moundridge, Kan., CoMark in southern Kansas, and Equity Marketing Alliance at Enid, Okla. AgMark still exists, with CVA (Central Valley Ag) at York, Neb. as the dominant owner. Team Marketing has dissolved. CoMark and Equity Marketing have merged. In hindsight, while the groups substantially improved producers’ grain bids and cooperative earnings, they also allowed the member-cooperatives to resist change.

Rail car mover

Ronald: What strikes me is that the elevators themselves are the emblems of these organizations that otherwise have few physical manifestations.

Brad: There was another joint marketing group proposed for western Kansas. This included the cooperatives at Syracuse, Johnson, Elkhart, and Ulysses. The entity that materialized from those discussions was similar … but different. ADM Grain got involved and a whole new structure evolved that included the cooperatives (less Elkhart) and what were ADM/Collingwood facilities in western and southwestern Kansas. This included the ADM facilities in Johnson’s trade area, and a bunch further south, including Hugoton, the seat of Stevens County. Over time, several more cooperatives merged in.

Trouble at Sunray, Brad Perry photo
More trouble at Sunray, Brad Perry photo

Brad: I was told once that it took as many as 12 employees to load a train at one of the monster Kansas terminals. That means one in the locomotive or a smaller car mover; another two or three opening and then closing car hatches; two others in the headhouse running a hopper scale that prints tickets; a grader; one boss supervising everything; and at least four on bicycles in the tunnel beneath the storage annex. The tunnel guys are getting their instructions via radio from the boss, and being told, “Crack open bin 118 a quarter turn.” They are actually blending coming out of the annex bins onto the belt.  It takes several days to load a 110-car train out of most of these monsters.

Ronald: You had mentioned in a previous discussion that, at the country elevators, it was a couple of boxcars at a time.

Brad: Modern train loaders? Three or maybe four employees load a 110-car train in 12 hours. There’s one in the locomotive, one or 2 opening and closing hatches, and one in a control booth half-way up the side of the elevator. If it’s being shipped with origin USDA grades, then there is also a USDA grader on site. The employee in the booth is controlling the entire elevator— legs, gates, conveyors, etc.

Ronald: In a photo I took at Springfield, Colo., I didn’t know what to call the grotesque appendage at the end of the annex, marring the beautiful Tillotson elevator. This appendage incorporated a booth. You informed me it was for grain loading.

Ronald: You were impressed when reader Michael Petersen utilized AI to I.D. the unlabeled photo of an elevator, which turned out to be Tillotson’s job at Helena, Okla.

Brad: Glad the Helena mystery was solved!  I looked— been there but didn’t have any pictures. The current view from Google Earth is very typical of Kansas and Oklahoma elevators. The co-op added a McPherson jump-form tank at the end and put a leg and another dump between the annex and McPherson tank. The tank is probably 200,000 to 250,000 capacity. I’m betting the leg is either 7,500 or 10,000 bushels per hour.

Ronald: Some additional studies of the construction record show that Tillotson returned twice to Helena, each time to build more storage.

Brad: This high-speed approach has been both good and bad. It’s the standard approach that companies like Scoular have used to upgrade to shuttle-train-loading capability. In their case, it’s normally a 30,000-bph leg with a bulk weigher.  You can see this at Downs, in north-central Kansas, Venango in southwestern Nebraska, and additional locations. The bad side is, many slip-formed tubes weren’t designed with enough bearing pressure for this speed of loading. I’ve seen major holes blown right out through the side of the tube that these higher capacity legs were dumping into.

Evidence emerges concerning blaze near Tillotson elevator in Minneapolis, Kan.

by baggyparagraphs

By Ronald Ahrens

Reader Jim Kay has helped us to answer a question. Kay went to the Ottawa County Historical Museum, where he’s an advisory board member, and dug into the files. Therein he found a photo of a wood elevator ablaze in Minneapolis, Kan. near the concrete elevator built in 1947 by Tillotson Construction Co.

The caption beneath the photo reads: “Remember the elevator fire of 1947? The blaze was at the Farmers Elevator in Minneapolis. The fireman walking toward the truck is thought to be the late Floyd Forney. Photo Courtesy of Lew Wilcox.”

Kay adds his own note: “Date should read 1952.”

Blog partner Kristen Cart first visited Minneapolis years ago, a visit I’d forgotten when I went there on my road trip and as I wrote a subsequent post. Kristen had already identified the elevator as Tillotson’s 100,000-bushel job that’s listed in our records.

With more than 500 posts and 1,700 images since 2011, it’s not always easy to remember.

Kristen’s listed all the specifications of the 1947 job and inserted some nice photos, including the one above. At the time of its construction and for some years after, the elevator was unique because of the integrated cupola (below). It was later retrofitted with the boxy high-rise cupola seen in the more recent photos.

Tillotson returned in 1948 to build the mill building.

Kristen wrote:

The elevator was starkly beautiful, balanced, and gracefully situated in its surroundings. Though it was small, its graceful proportions made it seem monumental.

On my visit, photo above, I missed the embossed manhole covers Kristen had already identified. The employee who came out of the office to greet me said the whole complex was the work of Chalmers & Borton, and instead of prowling around I took him at his word and then listened to him say the Tillotson elevator must have been the one destroyed by a fire, which he thought was in the 1990s.

Jim Kay has now verified that there was a fire. The rest of the tall tale I was given doesn’t match other facts we’ve turned up. What is now known thanks to Jim’s diligence is that the Tillotson elevator escaped a fire, then served as the anchor for an expanded operation, with a retrofitted cupola and storage annex by Chalmers & Borton.

The graceful Tillotson elevator is a survivor, still on the job. All gratitude to Jim Kay for his legwork, helping to flesh out the story.

Reader I.D. of photo leads to tale of mayhem and woe in Helena, Okla.

by baggyparagraphs

Reader Michael Petersen is no slouch. Seeing our previous post about a mystery elevator, he sprang into action. The above photo from the Tillotson Construction Co. archive was unlabeled. Nearly every other photo from the collection has pencil notes on back indicating when and where, but not this one. The elevators could help us out with labeling of their own, but they’re mute.

“Saw your post about the unknown elevator,” Petersen writes. “With a little help from AI, is this the one?” He includes the link to a Google Street View image.

Comparing the then-and-now images, we’re inclined to say our friend Petersen scored a bullseye. Everything in the two photos corresponds to records.

Tillotson built a 100,000-bushel main house for the Co-op in 1947. The notes at the top of the first record say “full cupola” and describe four 15.5-foot-diameter tanks reaching 110 feet in height.

A storage annex of five tanks and 100,000-bushel capacity joined in 1949. Another annex of 10 tanks and 200,000 bushels was in 1953. The tanks measured 15.5 feet in diameter and 110 feet high.

That seems to account for all the tanks in the vintage photo. The next thing is to determine is the provenance of the second elevator, seen at far right. An ad in the Sept. 20, 1945 edition of The Helena Star answers it was put up in 1941.

Heavy rains of mid-June 1949 causing flooding and mayhem as farmers tried to start the wheat harvest. On June 16, The Star reported, “Water filled the basements of several homes, as well as both of the grain elevators.”

One assumes that means water filled the basements of the grain elevators, not the concrete tanks. Despite the editor’s vagueness, this news indicates the second elevator was already in place. No telling what month Tillotson built the annex.

During the rainy June weekend, an unthinkable tragedy took place at another Alfalfa County location, an unincorporated place called Yewed, about 20 miles from Helena.

“Freddie Calhoun, who moved recently from Aline to Cherokee to work for that city’s light department, was killed Saturday evening about 5 o’clock when he came into contact with a 220-volt electric wire on which he was working at the Yewed elevator. Another employee, Bob Willis, was in a critical condition Monday in the Cherokee hospital after being electrocuted in the same vicinity at Yewed Sunday.” 

Calhoun was said to have been well-known in Helena.

It’s hard to imagine how two such accidents could occur just a day apart at the same location. Things got worse, though. On June 16, the same day the Star published news of the floods and electrocutions, yet another tragedy occurred. David Earl Fowler, a 10-year-old boy who attended school 20 miles away in Nash, Okla., died in a terrible accident. The Star: “He was crushed beneath a truck while he lay asleep under a tree near a grain elevator in Helena.” 

It’s well-known that elevators were dangerous places, but Helena is a whole other category.

Omaha council OKs one step in proposed adaptive re-use of Vinton Street terminal

by baggyparagraphs

By Ronald Ahrens

Fifteen years of blogging has exposed us to various concepts for the re-use of old grain elevators. Proposals have ranged from interesting to daft.

Consider these examples:

  • The sleek Mayer-Osborn elevator in Tempe, Ariz. was going to be made into a hotel, which struck me as daft.
  • Two guys from Missouri had cast their eyes from big terminals in Buffalo, N.Y., to San Francisco’s threatened Pier 92, with a mind to developing vertical farms inside the tanks. It seems more practical to adapt other types of buildings for vertical farming.
  • In 2012, the Vinton Street terminal complex in Omaha received national attention after the annexes served as the canvas for a public art project; a nonprofit organization commissioned artists to create themed banners that were draped over the silos. Then someone proposed turning the complex into a climbing facility. The art was intriguing, but the climbing facility was daft.

Mayer-Osborn’s 1951 Tempe elevator

A few weeks ago, after we announced receipt of an archive of family papers and photos, Patrick Mason, director of business development for Dicon Construction, contacted us.

“Any chance they gave you anything related to the Vinton Silos? I am the owner. We are building apartments on the site but preserving some of the bins.”

We haven’t gotten to the blueprints yet, but there are among them records for the Vinton Street complex.

The Vinton Street complex, which was a signature project for Tillotson Construction Co., has been problematic for years. The Reader, which bills itself as “A Service of Nebraska Public Media,” reported “The old grain elevator and silos have sat empty for decades, attracting urban explorers, adventurous teens and an array of graffiti artists. In 2017, a man in his 50s fell about 30 feet, lying hurt with a broken leg until he was discovered at sunrise. In 2024, a teenage girl was seriously injured after falling 20 feet, and another teen was rescued after getting stuck.”

Latest news on the Dicon Construction’s adaptive re-use project is to knock down most of the elevator and annex, saw off a few tanks above ground level, and spent $56.2 million to build an apartment complex. A rendering shows a small building and the pool and patio resting atop the stubs of about 10 sawed-off tanks.

The Omaha City Council was considering Dicon’s application for $10.4 million in tax-increment financing.

The proposed project ranks somewhere between the high point so far, which is the public art project, and the low, which is the idea for a climbing facility. My wife lived two blocks from the elevator and points out the limited circulation of traffic in the neighborhood, which ends up pressing against Interstate 80.

Would hundreds of new residents improve or degrade the neighborhood?

All governmental units are perpetually hungry for added revenue. If the Omaha city council really wants to go ahead with Dicon’s unusual development, the members should have a midafternoon snack to tame their hunger and then think hard about the questions of public safety and the impact of a high-density development at this clogged-up location.

I don’t have an opinion on the appropriateness of the project, although it seems quirky. Nor am I one who thinks every grain elevator should be restored and made into a shrine, as we’re seeing in Broken Arrow, Okla.

One thing to say, though, is that I continue to marvel at the way a derelict grain elevator fires the imagination.

Examination of newspaper accounts reveals fate of Tillotson elevator in York, Nebr.

by kocart



York Republican, June 6, 1951

By Kristen Cart

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.

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.

Lone carpenter braves scaffolding, brings new elevator to completion at Shelby, Nebr. in 1934

by baggyparagraphs

A lone worker adds finishing touches to an elevator in this photo dated Oct. 4, 1934 and inscribed “Shelby, Nebraska.” Shelby is today a town of 600 in Polk County, south of Columbus. The man balances on rudimentary scaffolding at the top of the structure, which we estimate to be about 55 feet high. A Ford coupe is parked on the ground below.

It is unknown whether this elevator was an all-new facility or the replacement for a damaged one. The nearest we can come to answering the question is a brief report in the Polk County News of the previous year.

“The Shelby elevators assumed a business activity on Monday (July 10, 1933) that reminded one of former days of prosperity, as we are informed that 213 loads of corn were delivered to the elevators that day, and the price paid was 47c per bushel.

“To show the difference in the price of farm products now and a little over four months ago, we reprint the markets as printed in the Sun on March 2, in comparison with the markets of today. We leave the reader to draw his own conclusions as to the cause of this improvement in the grain market. There’s a reason.”

Please see the news clip for price tables. Our interest is drawn to the phrase “Shelby elevators.” It’s impossible to say how many there were, or to account for this new elevator presumably built by Van Ness Construction, of Omaha, with Tillotson involvement.

We welcome comments from readers on wooden elevator construction methods. Another news item that came up in our search said a 20,000-bushel elevator in another Nebraska town was estimated to cost $7,000.

It would also be interesting to hear what “reason” the Polk editor had in mind about price improvements.