Maybe we’ve spent too long looking at grain elevators. On the other hand, after visiting Bryce Canyon National Park and seeing the hoodoos and rock towers, we experienced an irrefutable doppelgänger effect when we happened upon the abandoned Osiris Mill and Creamery, a.k.a. Red Mill. The two locations are thirty miles apart within Kane County, Utah. Osiris Mill, named for the Egyptian deity of the underworld, has the requisite ghostly quality and serves as a mysterious double to the park’s eroded formations.
John’s Valley Road, the narrow paved byway from Bryce Canyon City, Utah to the tiny hamlet of Antinomy, follows the east fork of the Sevier River through remote country that hardly promised an elevator discovery, yet we found a mill house and grain storage tanks in an obscure place called Black Canyon.
The wooden structure that adjoined stubby concrete tanks appeared after we passed a series of irrigated alfalfa fields on the plateau. Four tanks rose about twenty-five feet from the canyon floor. They were creased at regular intervals and seemed to indicate a type of construction other than the familiar slip-forming of our prairie and Great Plains elevators. The outer surfaces of the tanks were pleated, so to speak, and I had the impression they were made of precast concrete and joined together by mortar. The place was fenced, though, so it wasn’t possible to get up close. My guess is that, because the tanks aren’t so tall, a lower load-bearing rating meant this manner of construction produced a result sufficient in strength. Additionally, it’s hard to imagine a continuous-pour operation in such an out-of-the-way place.
In the central space between them, the four tanks supported a generously proportioned superstructure, which I’d otherwise call a run, and a ramshackle cupola.
I stepped out of the car for pictures but found it unnerving to have the absolute stillness broken by intermittent blasts from a medium-bore rifle. It seemed a safe bet the target wasn’t a grain-elevator blogger, though. Anyway, it’s illegal to shoot across a road, isn’t it? So I went ahead with the photos. It was around five o’clock, and the ruins were harshly backlit.
Returning afterwards to the car, I drove away hoping to find details about this attractive hybrid building, part grain-storage facility and part mill.
In no more than ten miles, my wife and I came to the tiny Garfield County hamlet of Antimony, pronounced AN-ti-MO-NEE, which takes its name from a “metalloid element” that’s useful as an alloy and in the making of semiconductors.
The name Antimony definitely doesn’t suggest a grain trading capital. The town is said to be so remote that it was the last in Utah to get electricity.
Nothing was moving except for a sturdy-looking man doing landscaping chores at Antimony Community Center.
“Oh, that’s Red Mill,” he said when I described the subject of my investigation. There used to be dryland wheat farming where the alfalfa is now, he said. The wheat growers gave it up after the Drought of … he couldn’t remember but reckoned the flour mill was last used sixty years ago.
Red Mill, more properly called Osiris Mill and Creamery, was built by William F. Holt, a major figure in western development projects. When he died in 1951, The New York Times declared, “WILLIAM HOLT, 87, BUILDER OF TOWNS; Developer of Resources of the Imperial Valley Dies–Work Formed Basis of Novel.” Or as the Garfield County News summarized: California’s Imperial Valley benefited from Holt’s touch.
Holt first came to Garfield County from his home in Hollywood, California in 1923. The County News lauded him:
“He was the real father of the Imperial Valley, starting work there in about 1900, at a time when there was neither water nor people in that entire country, its only inhabitants being horned toads and Gila monsters, and the turkey buzzards and crows all carried canteens.”
The News reported Holt’s initial development had started at Widstoe, namely, a power plant, a creamery, and Holt “expected to have a flour mill running in the near future.” He was president of Garfield Land Company, which operated out of a Los Angeles P.O. box. In 1926, Holt received permission from the Utah State Engineer’s Office to divert water from the east fork of the Sevier and fill a 3,000-acre-foot impoundment. The water would be used to irrigate 1,600 surface acres. Holt liked to go on about how California was becoming overcrowded and needed to import food — “everything that is suitable to be raised in this part of the country,” according to the News. He pushed for a new road between Widstoe, where his own fields were, and Escalante so that farm produce could more easily reach the Union Pacific line at Cedar City, arriving the next night in L.A.
Osiris Mill served as a granary and creamery at the now-defunct town of Osiris, named for the Egyptian deity who lorded over the underworld while also representing fertility and agriculture. Ruins on the other side of John’s Canyon road indicate the remains of Osiris. Widstoe is also characterized today as a ghost town; it was up on the plateau where I saw the irrigated fields. Widstoe and Osiris were separate by fifteen miles, and it seems safe to assume the flour mill and creamery referred to in the newspaper were the same relic we visited despite not being located at Widstoe.
Henry Bell Wright, the first American novelist to make $1 million, modeled a character on Holt in The Winning of Barbara Worth. Wright’s novel became a silent movie starring Ronald Colman, Vilma Bánky, and Gary Cooper. This Western flickered before the public in 1926, the same year the Utah Engineer’s Office awarded irrigation rights.
While time itself seems to stand still in this part of Garfield County, a full century has elapsed since the movie’s release.
The Osiris Mill and Creamery was well-crafted, which makes today’s overgrown site especially regrettable.
Despite the gunfire, our discovery of Osiris seemed heaven-sent. Even though it’s not one of Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, we’re pleased to shine the spotlight once again on this remote wonderment.
So far, it’s impossible to explain why a photo of a tractor dealership was included in the archive of Tillotson Construction Co. We await further illumination.
Newspaper searches first reveal Troth Tractor & Equipment Co. in 1946 in Omaha. The dealership offered an integrated approach to farming. A classified ad in the World-Herald advises readers: Troth Tractor and Equipment, Authorized Ford-Ferguson Sales and Service. 2515 O St., MA 7958
Henry Ford and Harry Ferguson collaborated on the Ford-Ferguson 9N tractor, examples of which are seen here. This was around the same time that Raymond Loewy and Associates, of New York, designed the new Farmall for International-Harvester.
Wood Bros. Pickers (see sign) refers to the Wood Brothers Thresher Co.’s single-row corn harvester that the tractor towed along. Picked corn would be lofted into a wagon that trailed the picker. Wood Brothers was founded in Minnesota in 1893 and moved to Des Moines in 1899. A Facebook post provides further information:
Wood Bros. Thresher Company marketed their corn pickers on their own and then sold to the Harry Ferguson Co., a part of Ford MotorCompany.
WHY PAY CASH? asks Troth in this 1949 ad.
New improved Ford tractors and Wood Brothers pickers cost you less per acre and mean more income. Buy your new improved Ford tractor, Dearborn equipment, and Wood Brothers corn picker now. Up to 2 years to pay. Very low budget rates. A farm plan to fit your every need. Let the Ford tractor pay its own way and keep the profit in your pocket. We are easy to deal with. See us today. Omaha’s Ford Farming Headquarters.
The Dearborn Disc Plow and other implements were produced by the Dearborn Farm Equipment, agriculture division of Ford Motor Co. Note the neon sign in the showroom’s plate glass.
H.B. Smith, next door at 2517 O St., also appears to be a postwar addition to the O Street tableau.
To repeat, we can’t explain this photo. But if you told us that it was included because Uncle Mike Tillotson loved Ford Motor Co. so very much, that would be good enough.
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.
The Great Depression forced many changes in the early 1930s. For one, the Nye & Jenks Grain Co. decided to get out of the lumber business at its Bruno, Nebr. location. To that end, in April of 1934, men were tearing down the lumber sheds at the company’s location in that little Butler County burg. The plan was to use the lumber on hand, along with some hauled to Bruno from Cedar Bluffs–which lay 25 miles distant in Saunders County–to put up a storage annex.
Nye & Jenks was an Omaha company, and a cursory search of archived newspapers suggests Van Ness Construction Co. was their preferred contractor. There was more activity at other eastern Nebraska locations such as Fremont, Wahoo, Cedar Bluffs, and Brainard.
Van Ness, of course, employed Charles H. Tillotson and his son, Reginald O. Tillotson. In 1934, Reginald was around 26 years old, newly married to Margaret I. McDunn, but not yet a father. Their first son, Charles J. Tillotson, was born in 1935.
After her 1925 graduation from Wayne State College, Margaret had taught in Lynch, Nebr. for a time, and coincidentally Nye & Jenks appears to have had an elevator there, too.
Charles H. Tillotson died in 1938. Reginald passed away in 1960, and Margaret in 1995. Charles J. died in February 2026.
Reginald’s notes in a photo album retrieved from family archives indicate the men seen above are Dean Essex, R.O. Tillotson, Rupert Hammonds, Tony Proskovec, and C.H. Tillotson. We don’t think the listing proceeds from left to right, though, and are unable to say just who is who. We think R.O. and C.H Tillotson are two of the three wearing the working garb. As for the others, we couldn’t learn anything that would pin down their identities.
Patches of snow on the ground suggest a late-winter or early spring date for the photo. The men are dressed for a chilly day, although the sunny moment was somewhat balmy.
The Peoples Banner, a weekly newspaper published in Butler County, gave this update on June 21 (using one of the many variant spellings for Nye & Jenks Grain Co.:
The work of re-modeling the Nye, Jenks & Co. elevator in Bruno has been completed. The elevator now has a capacity of 30,000 bushels. The company has discontinued the lumber business and will handle grain and coal from now on.
At the same time, Anton Proskovec left Bruno to work at the Nye & Jenks elevator in Funk, Nebr., a town 165 miles to the southwest. It was a seven-week assignment, though, as the Peoples Banner reported him back on Aug. 9.
Ed Dvorak, who has been manager of the Nye, Jenks & Co. grain elevator for a number of months [since the previous August], left Saturday for his home at Howells [40 miles due north]. V.A. Proskovec will have charge of the business.”
Our insertions in the above passage are in brackets.
We think V.A. Proskovec and Anton Proskovec are the same person, and that would also include the Tony Proskovec of the photo.
An interesting, earlier note from the Brainard Clipper, the paper in the town just south of Bruno, intimates just how tough the times were indeed. The report of March 9, 1933 says:
The Farmers Elevator are not buying any grain, while due to arrangements made in the company’s head offices, the Nye & Jenks Grain Co. are able to buy up to $25 worth of grain from any one farmer, paying for it in the Co’s scrip. This scrip is made payable on or before April 1, and is acceptable by many of the wholesale houses thereby making it practical for merchants to accept it in trade. The scrip is issued in amounts of $5 or less.
We leave the reader to discern the full implications.
It would be just four years before Tillotson Construction Co. was formed and turned its attention to large elevators made of reinforced concrete.
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.
Tillotson Construction Co. was one of several organizations that welcomed Nixon Truck Grain Market at 27th and O Streets in a Dec. 1, 1938 Omaha Daily Journal-Stockman ad. “Let good construction and equipment increase your profits,” the Tillotson ad line advised.
Just 30 days later, another paper, The Daily Record, carried the brief notice of a leasing agreement between A.A. Nixon & Co. and Tillotson for machinery and equipment. Value of the lease was $1,808.24.
With questions on why a prosperous company like Nixon would lease, we tabbed Brad Perry, who’s a good friend of Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators, to explain. Brad has had a career in finance, which he described in an email:
With the Farm Credit meltdown of the mid 1980’s, the 12 District Banks for cooperatives merged with the central Bank for Cooperatives, headquartered in Denver. Then it was renamed CoBank.
More history: There were 12 Farm Credit Districts, roughly similar to the Federal Reserve Districts. Each District had a Federal Land Bank with local Land Bank Associations, a Federal Intermediate Credit Bank with Production Credit Associations, and a Bank for Coops (BC). The central bank handled the large loans that exceeded the District Banks for Coops’ lending limits.
All this changed after the farm crisis of the late 1980’s. There are now a total of six District Banks, including CoBank.
I was at the Omaha BC from 1975 to 1987. In 1980, OBC started a consulting company to work with coops in our District, which was Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. At the depth of the farm crisis, I took the consulting company private. I’m still trying to fully retire, but have a couple clients I can’t say no to!
Q. Was it customary to lease machinery and equipment from the builder of an elevator?
A. I’m betting that the elevator’s owner didn’t have adequate funds to pay for everything, so the equipment was leased to him/her. That was not unusual. Why the equipment? It could be pulled out and re-sold.
Q. It looks like individual grain merchants like Nixon monopolized the market in grain distribution.
A. You’re about right on the grain merchants and monopolizing the grain business. The primary one was Cargill, along with the flour millers. Pillsbury, Washburn (Gold Medal), and so on. On the Northern Plains, there was also Peavey. Most of them were in cahoots with the railroads. There really wasn’t any government action that broke them up, but their predatory pricing. That gave rise to farmer-organized cooperatives and locally owned grain companies. The federal government did come in to the grain business in the early 1930s–the Great Depression. They created the Federal Grain Company to buy surplus stocks, i.e. wheat. Some of those elevators still stand and are still in use.
Q. It also looks like we’ll be on the road in a few weeks, and that could lead through southwestern Kansas, where Tillotson built elevators in a string of small towns.
A. On your Kansas trip, southern Kansas has some of the oldest concrete elevators in the country. All were built for wheat. As you know, there are mammoth elevators in Salina, Hutchinson, Topeka, and Wichita–particularly Haysville just South of Wichita. On or within 25 miles of U.S. 81/I-35 are four of the five largest elevators in the world. These are in Salina, Hutchinson, Haysville, and Enid, Okla. All were paid for by Commodity Credit Corporation storage payments.
Q. Besides the bountiful grain production, why are they concentrated there?
A. It was not unusual for wheat to be stored as long as 10 years. All wheat into the “terminals” came in 40-foot boxcars from area elevators. You’ll notice larger elevators the farther west you get. Notice Dodge City. It was too far away from the terminals, so they built more storage locally. You’ll see the same in Garden City, Ulysses, and other southwest Kansas towns.
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.
Rose A. Tillotson was widow of Charles H. Tillotson and mother to Joe and Reginald.
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!
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.
The cache of archival photos recovered from the Tillotson homestead includes an image of a wooden elevator complex, but there are no inscriptions on back of the photo so we have no clue of the location or date.
Close inspection of the image reveals the smaller of the two elevator buildings is labeled. It appears that “Farmers Co-Op” was painted over other lettering, possibly “Grain & Coal.”
The larger building–how about that headhouse!–is labeled Farmers Co-Op Co.
We sure wish we could identify the woman standing on the office porch. She is buttoned up tight inside her overcoat and giving a nice smile.
The car looks like a mid-1930s Pontiac.
There are other markings. We see the numerals 2 and 8 at the extreme left but can’t explain them. Three signs hang on the outer walls of the office. The one the car is facing advertises Semi Solid Buttermilk, a brand of partially dehydrated buttermilk that was used as a livestock and poultry feed supplement.
Brand advertising claimed: “When Sows are fed Semi-Solid they have little or no trouble from ‘dreaded white scours’ among the pigs.”
Ad from The Nebraska Farmer, Feb. 2, 1929
Signs to either side of the woman are illegible, but the shingle under the gable is inscribed Fairbanks Scales.
All the signs would lend the elevator a stamp of authentication: a patron of this establishment could be assured of getting the most advanced and most accurate services.
In general, the whole complex projects a mighty aura, and it’s easy to suspect this was one of the leading operations in its region.
This much is known: Tillotson Construction Co. performed a job for E.M. Peet Manufacturing Co. in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It’s with apparent disinterest, or at best indifference, that the backs of two photos are marked “Warehouse.” No record of the job itself can be located, so we have to guess the date and what exactly was built. A 5,000-square-foot addition was done in 1958 to increase sacking and storage capacity as Peet’s joined the trend of adding bulk-storage bins, six in all. But that small job went to Ranch Construction Co., with Grain Storage and Construction Co. getting the machinery contract.
The photos suggest Tillotson Construction did a bigger project. We estimate the width of the two-story building at 80 feet. Could 15,000 square feet be too high for the total volume?
We’re trying to identify the two trucks and their model years, which could be pre-World War Two.
The next best clue for the date of Tillotson’s job is a Peet’s newspaper ad.
E.M. Peet Manufacturing Co. was founded in 1917 by Ernest M. Peet and W.A. Ruehlman. It was Peet who ran the company as president, making livestock and poultry feeds. Besides their home location at 33 S. 25th St., Peet’s had branches in several states. They also had test farms.
Pete was a Christian Scientist and belonged to fraternal lodges in the Bluffs. He and his wife Ethel lived at 163 Glen Avenue. Their daughter was Mrs. Dorothy Bammann. Ethel proved to be a ding-a-ling. She belonged to the American Bell Association and collected more than 1,000 bells. She used to drag out her suitcase and pack her dress, the one with bells sewn on it, and go to the ABA’s annual conventions in different cities.
“Everybody comes dressed with bell accessories in some manner,” she told the Daily Nonpareil’s “What’s Your Hobby?” column.
Ernie Peet was 63 years old when he died Dec. 10, 1944—a shock to the community. More than 500 people including 75 of his salesmen attended the funeral, and there were truckloads of flowers. The Daily Nonpareil lamented:
The death of E.M. Peet has left Council Bluffs without one of its best established and well-known business leaders. His loss will be felt for a long time.”
The revealing newspaper ad we referred to ran on February 11, 1945.
Until Reginald Tillotson speaks from his own grave, we have no way of pinning down whether the warehouse was done in Peet’s lifetime, but it’s interesting that the archival photo (top of post) matches the photo of Peet’s operation in the ad. All this indicates an early job for Tillotson Construction, one they finished well before Ernie Peet’s death.
Peet’s was big enough that its sales staff would congregate for special presentations on the latest advances. In 1951, for example, a group of 75 convened for three days at the Hotel Chieftain and, among other things, heard a University of Minnesota professor report new measures in animal nutrition such as adding Vitamin B-12, select minerals, and even antibiotics to the feed.
All that was for bovine and porcine types. But an amusing anecdote expands the Peet’s legacy in a feline way.
In 1955, the warehouse cat, Lily, received publicity from a Daily Nonpareil story, which led to her selection as winner of the national Puss’n Boots Bronze Award. (Puss’n Boots was a brand of pet food.) The citation purred:
Amusing mascot, loyal friend, doting mother—that’s Lily. Born in a manufacturing plant (now raising her family there), this affectionate feline endeared herself to fellow workers by her fondness for riding on the company tractor. No day is complete for her friends until Lily comes riding by. To loyal, adaptable Lily, a tractor-riding tabby, this tribute.
Our Grandfathers' Grain Elevators 