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.
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.
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!
Besides Goltry, we find details from Newkirk, Okla.; Douglas, Okla.; Medford, Okla.; Thomas, Okla.; Minatare, Nebr.; Sheldon, Iowa; Peterson, Iowa; Burlington, Okla.; Cherokee, Okla.; Lamont, Okla.; Blackwell, Okla.; Booker, Tex.; Follett, Tex.; Farnsworth, Tex.; Custer, Okla.; Elkhart, Kan.; Kingfisher, Okla.; Thomas, Okla. (another job); Ensign, Kan.; Pond Creek, Okla.; and Wellsburg, Iowa.
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.
Our Grandfathers' Grain Elevators 