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“I have information for you on two elevators,” says Concrete Kid, also known as Chandler Thomas.

In the first case, it’s bad news.

“The Pocahontas, Iowa elevator was demolished a couple of years ago.”

A call to Pro Cooperative in Pocahontas produced an “I haven’t worked here that long” response, but Google Earth shows only steel bins at 101 N. Main St.

In the autumn of 1949, Tillotson Construction Co. undertook a 250,000-bushel elevator in the northwest Iowa town. It was a $125,000 project.

With his gaze shifting 225 miles to the southwest, Concrete Kid says, “You may wonder why the Bellwood, Nebr. elevator has no head house (cupola).”

We visited Bellwood in 2020 for photos (top of post) and have previously reported on two explosions at the elevator. The first was in 1959.

The second explosion occurred April 7, 1981, resulting in the deaths of a worker, Gary Roth, and a patron, Joe Stastney.

“The original elevator, built by Tillotson, blew up in the early 1980s. I was working at Todd & Sargent at the time. We were contracted to build a replacement elevator. The cooperative that owned the facility had the original Tillotson drawings that we could use for dimensional reference.”

“It has been a long time ago, but I believe we performed engineering analysis of the existing foundation and found it to be suitable for reuse. We built a new elevator that was dimensionally the same in plan as the original elevator. However, we did not build a new head house; rather, we constructed a structural tower to support the bucket elevator. The spouting supported the distributor.”

Thanks to Concrete Kid, we have a definitive explanation of why Bellwood is home to the Headless Horseman of Tillotson elevators.