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 statewide South Carolina newspaper column. “It looked like we were in the Mid-west.”

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

“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 storage annex each measured 18 feet in diameter and reached 108.5 feet in height.

Eleazer’s rhapsody continued:

“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.

“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, Tillotson Construction completed a brand-new twin-leg elevator of 334,000 bushels capacity at Estill, 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, our own 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.”

A scaffold broke! It’s 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.