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.