By Ronald Ahrens

With its namesake in Ireland, the town of Clare, Iowa brings to mind leprechauns and four-leaf clovers. With its dwarfish cupola and four tanks, the Tillotson elevator there suits the tenor of the town.

It’s one of Tillotson Construction’s orphans, as Kristen Cart put it in an earlier post. “Orphan designs were unique storage plans, made to meet unusual customer needs.” she wrote.

Built in 1949, this single-leg 88,800-bushel elevator is unique in the Tillotson catalog. It towers above its setting at the eastern edge of an impact crater, one created when a 10-billion-ton asteroid struck millions of years ago; yet it’s among the company’s lesser concrete elevators. For the sake of comparison, consider that, at the same time as this job in Webster County, there was also a 310,000-bushel elevator project in Dalhart, Tex.

Clare’s new concrete elevator joined two wood elevators and at least two-dozen gleaming metal bins that were well within reach of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway.

The town had fewer than 200 people, and elevator construction in this obscure location didn’t merit coverage in the newspaper from Fort Dodge, the county seat and largest town. What we know about the elevator is from Tillotson’s records:

• Four tanks measuring 15.5 feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height
• 46 x 36 slab
• 800 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, 18 tons of plain concrete for hopper
• 36.8 tons of reinforcing steel
• 18-inch main slab
• 4,530 tons gross weight loaded
• 13 x 19 x 12 cupola
• Pulley centers 138.0 feet apart

While finding nothing on elevator construction, we did learn from the Fort Dodge Messenger & Chronicle that in December of 1949, not long after the elevator’s completion, the co-op held its annual meeting:

“The Farmers Co-op elevator held the annual meeting recently, at which time the following members were elected to the board of directors for a period of three years: Tom Crilly, Julius Albrecht and Walter Seltz. Mr. Seltz was also elected president of the Co-op.”

The Clare co-op merged into New Cooperative in 1978, and a recent photo indicates the Tillotson elevator’s luck is holding.