One of the last photos from the archive of Tillotson Construction Co. that relates to our exploration of southwest Kansas is from the tiny Stevens County town of Moscow. Time was scarce and we weren’t able to swing by the elevators in Moscow, Rolla, or Elkhart in that part of the state, but the aerial photo gives us a good look.
The single-leg elevator in Moscow stands along the Cimarron Valley Railroad and U.S. Route 56. It was built on an original plan in 1948, duplicating the curved-cupola that Tillotson had worked out the previous year in nearby Satanta.
The 100,000-bushel Moscow elevator had four tanks measuring 14 feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height. The job required 1,070 cubic yards of reinforced concrete and 49.8 tons of reinforcing steel (including jack rods).
The main slab was 40 x 45 feet and covered 1,712 square feet. The gross weight loaded was 5,490 tons.
The cupola was 14 x 36 x 23 feet (L x W x H). Pulley centers in the leg were 145.5 feet apart.
A note in the records, at the bottom of page 3 (not shown), says “Bad weather.” A second note, this one on 3A, indicates the office building at the site was also part of the build.
I’d like to say more about the history of the Moscow elevator, but from lack of access to digitized Kansas newspaper files, I can’t find contemporary reports of the construction nor any background on Moscow Elevator Company or E.L. Gaskill & Sons, whose names are proclaimed in the aerial image.
For now, I have to satisfy myself with the knowledge it was a good-looking elevator when new, another example of Tillotson style.
The Great Depression of the 1930s and disruptions of World War Two caused Baca County, Colo. and its seat of Springfield to suffer a population decline of 45 percent. Census data reveal that Springfield had 1,800 residents in 1948, when Tillotson Construction Co. built a massive 250,000-bushel, twin-leg elevator of reinforced concrete.
As observed in a previous post, the mighty elevator followed the standard plan implemented in 1947 at Satanta, Kan.
Since then, we’ve learned that Tillotson formed a rounded cupola in Satanta, possibly the first demonstration of the style that became a Tillotson signature.
A note in the construction record says a primary difference was that Springfield had two radial distributors up high instead of the Gerber Roto -Flo system installed at Satanta.
Integrated into the main house were no fewer than 20 internal bins and a dustbin.
Another note says the job included construction of the office building seen to the right of the elevator. Photos from our June 8 visit show the building little-changed.
If only I’d possessed an aerial drone to take the same shot from the northwest.
What’s particularly revealing about the 1948 aerial photo is the sparsely populated village, as seen on a day when light snow covers the nearby fields. The new elevator dwarfs two neighboring wood elevators. The water tower, previously the tallest structure, is no longer so impressive.
And why were there no trees? Springfield was founded by Windsor Town Company in 1887. The tree-planting trend evidently took hold after 1948.
Springfield’s population has continued to dwindle. The town’s website claims 1,375 souls in 2020. It’s part of a general decline of population in towns and villages of the Great Plains.
The elevator and storage annex now rise from a leafy setting. With its cupola, the elevator reaches 160.25 feet, far higher than any tree that will endure the gales. Springfield is 139 years old, but at the current pace, I wonder if the bicentennial in 2087 will find just the elevator outlasting the people and their trees.
As described in an earlier post, we visited the Tillotson elevator in Satanta, Kan. at sundown on June 8 and found our subject jubilantly aglow with a cloak of soft pink against the sky’s fading cobalt.
Tillotson Construction Co. built the twin-leg elevator as part of its Class of 1947. It was a 250,000-bushel undertaking in the same year they built elevators in Minneapolis, Kan.; Dalhart, Tex.; Rushville, Nebr.; and Helena and Eva, Okla. It was only exceeded in capacity by the 265,000-bushel classmate 100 miles away in Gruver, Tex. Tillotson had already built a 350,000-bushel elevator in Farnsworth, Tex. in 1945. The Class of ’47 nonetheless comprised the latest and greatest achievements for the Omaha company that had formed only nine years and one World War earlier.
It’s worth keeping in mind, as contributor Brad Perry informs me, there was need for greater storage capacity as elevators were situated farther and farther from shipping terminals to the east.
To see Satanta from a distance, while a locomotive scruffed and chuffed along the tracks on a local mission, was a revelation. A rising arpeggio from a string orchestra would have fit the moment.
There was another epiphany to come. After returning home to California in mid-June, I opened the photo file and found a portrait of the brawny new elevator, a gleaming 166.75-foot-tall class president of an elevator.
Windows high in the sky brighten the interior of the substantial, curvaceous cupola.
A note in the construction record says “Round end on cupola not per plans.” The way the story was transmitted by my late-uncle Charles J. Tillotson, the rounded cupola was an improvisation as Grandfather Reginald Tillotson found 90-degree corners unsatisfactory and determined it was easier to bend the formwork around the structure.
Did Satanta provide that moment of innovation?
Triumphant letters spelled out Satanta Co-Op Grain Co. then. Traces of a succeeding label are seen now. It’s a different style, and there’s racy red-and-blue striping on a tank.
The 1947 photo shows the elevator already at work. The 10.5-inch load-out spout is connected to a boxcar. The driveway door is up, allowing access to the 50-ton truck scale that measured 50 x 10 feet. We see snow melting around the lot on a fair day. In the lower left, a 1939 Ford Tudor sedan stands by for action. To the immediate right of the elevator, an arrangement of steel tanks is outfitted with a ladder and crude bridgework for access.
And to the far right, the old wood elevator looks on with awe.
A storage annex came along later, helping to complete the scene we found on that June evening at the start of another harvest. After nearly eighty years, the Tillotson elevator was still proving its worth by serving the Satanta community.
For the final stop on our Utah-Colorado-Kansas road trip leading to Omaha, Neb., my wife and I arrived in Minneapolis, Kan. at 12.00 noon on June 9 expecting to find the 100,000-bushel elevator that Tillotson Construction Co. built in 1947.
Seeking something obvious, we drove right up to the elevator complex at West 2nd Street and Markley Avenue. A friendly gent stepped out of the office and said Chalmers & Borton built the entire complex. Indeed, there were Chalmers & Borton manhole covers on the tanks of the annex. The main house featured a rectilinear cupola that was definitely not in the Tillotson style. We didn’t see any manhole covers on the sides of the tanks.
Then the gent told the tale of a massive fire in the 1990s that started in a feed mill, spread to a large lumber pile, and damaged an elevator next door. The fire department spent three days fully extinguishing the blaze and its last embers. The elevator had to be demolished.
We went to the site he indicated but saw nothing to suggest a former elevator.
Then we had lunch at Papa’s Burger Mill, nursing hopes of being able to track down details of the fire through newspaper records.
Minneapolis, a town of about 2,000 people, is situated just west of U.S. 81 some twenty minutes north of Salina, Kan. An AI overview offers:
“The area became a focal point for European-American settlement after the Civil War. In 1866, Israel Markley built a grist mill on the banks of the Solomon River and laid out the town. Originally called Markley’s Mills, the city was renamed Minneapolis around 1871—a name locals adopted from Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
None other than George Washington Carver attended high school here.
We had met apparent defeat in Minneapolis, though, and left the site without any proof of the elevator that’s in the Tillotson records. Or so we thought. It turned out to be a good thing that I took one establishing shot (top of post) showing the elevator complex from a southeastern vantage point.
To start work on this post, I searched unavailingly through newspaper archives. I called the Minneapolis village office and was referred to the Ottawa County Historical Museum. A woman named Beth revealed that the Minneapolis Messenger has never been digitized. She referred me to a museum advisory board member. I called up Jim Kay, a farmer, who said he’s 85 years old and a lifelong Ottawa County resident. He recalled a bit about the catastrophic fire but said there was never a second concrete elevator in Minneapolis. I sent him a photo from my desktop.
What was all the data from the construction record trying to tell me?
My investigation was heading nowhere until I thought to look through the recently acquired collection of photos from the Tillotson archive. Ta-da! There was a picture of Tillotson’s job. Inscribed on the back is “Minneapolis, Kan. 1947. The photographer’s stamp is B&M Photo Shop, “Everything Photographic,” Minneapolis, Kansas.
I called Jim Kay again. He said the whole question had been discussed at morning coffee. He agreed the photo depicts the same main house that stands today.
“It’s taken from the west side,” he said.
It’s an unusual elevator in the Tillotson catalog. A note on the record says it followed the plan established at Pond Creek, Okla,, but this one went up with “drawform walls thru cupola.” The single-leg elevator has four tanks measuring 15.5 feet in diameter and reaching 125 feet in height. The job consumed 906 cubic yards of concrete and 40.87 tons of reinforcing steel. Another 10 yards of concrete went for the hopper.
Fully loaded, the elevator was rated at 5,000 tons.
I have no idea about the rectangular tower. Nothing indicates it was part of the job. The only other note of significance says “Transfer spout to mill.”
The way we figure it, Chalmers & Borton, came along and modified the elevator, adding a new cupola in addition to building the storage annex.
The main house built by Tillotson still stands on its 41×41-foot slab doing the work it was designed for nearly eighty years ago. Thanks to help from others and a bit of luck, I’m satisfied it survived the inferno and we found what we were looking for.
As the evening sky turned to warm pastels and a train slugged along the track on terra firma, we approached Satanta, Kan. in search of the Tillotson elevator built in 1947.
Tillotson Construction Co. records led us to expect a 250,000-bushel, twin-leg main house with eight tanks (silos) measuring 18 feet in diameter and rising 120 feet. The cupola measures 21.5 x 48.5 x 40.25 feet, and tops out the elevator at 166.75 feet in height.
We hadn’t even considered it, but the harvest was just starting and trucks were expected to rumble up any moment. Everybody was prepared to work into the night. An employee saw me prowling around and came out of the office to caution me. Meanwhile, I’d already taken advantage of the opportunity to snap a couple of interior photos.
To allay questions about my legitimacy, inasmuch as possible, I said, “My grandfather built this elevator.”
The Tillotson elevator is 79 years old and has the scars and scabs and prostheses to prove it, but remains in operation for Skyland Grain LLC.
Complete specs for the elevator are found below in this post.
The elevator followed a plan established at Dike, Iowa and included eight internal bins. I looked for evidence of them along with the other marvels inside.
A remark on the records says, “Loading spout out bet. 2 tracks. Roto Flo dist. equipped 1 leg.”
U.S. Route 160 had led us from Springfield, Colo. into Kansas near a town called Johnson City. Continuing on this highway to its junction with Kansas Route 190, we covered the 50 miles to Satanta.
Tillotson built elevators in other southwestern Kansas towns: Moscow, Elkhart, Rolla, Montezuma, and Ensign. We lacked the time to wander to the first three and would only make it to Montezuma in the dark.
There is no record of Tillotson building the storage annex.
After Montezuma, we passed through Ensign on the way to our hotel at Dodge City, checking in at 11.00 p.m., exhausted after a 600-mile drive from Durango, Colo. with stops at several elevators. Then the clerk surprised us with the news that our room was on the third floor and neither of the elevators was working. They still weren’t working in the morning, either, so it came to hundreds of steps with all our stuff up and down and up in the night, down and up and down again in the morning.
On the side trip to Satanta, I should have asked to test the man lift. Despite the age, it probably works just fine.
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.
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 elevator in Gordon, Nebr. was built by Mayer-Osborn, as attested by its manhole covers. It was built in their iconic style.
Story and photos by Kristen Cart
When someone reaches their middle eighties intact and in good health, they can do whatever they want. It’s a reward that comes along with advanced age. Okay–it has to be within reason–say, within the budget, but there shouldn’t be any major obstacles, unless care-giving is in the picture. With my dad, Gerry Osborn, no such obstacle existed in 2019, before Covid-19 made its debut.
Gerry Osborn at the courthouse in Rushville, Nebr.
Dad and I had taken a western driving tour in 2018 to visit the house where I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, which he had architecturally restored from a sadly worn and altered state. It was a foursquare brick farmhouse with historic ties to early Mormon settlers. The current and longtime owner, Gundi Jones, kindly gave us a tour. We admired her finishing touches, which updated the mid-seventies decor as we had left it, to a European country style. It was beautiful.
We also took in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, before heading east for a stop at Mesa Verde, a marvelous place that captured Dad’s imagination. He was especially taken with its large collection of pre-Columbian artifacts.
Then, on our way home, we stopped at the Nuckolls County courthouse in Nelson, Nebr. The place brought back old memories. Dad explained that when he was a young student, he and his friends would play a game where they collected sightings of Nebraska license plates, each identified by a number designating its county of origin, 1 to 93. Each county was assigned a number, to be displayed on the license plate, in the order of the number of automobile registrations extant in each county as of 1922. So the most populous county was assigned the number 1, and plates with the number 93 were quite scarce.
Dad and his friends raced to try to find a plate from every county. The hardest ones to collect were from small counties at the other end of the state from Dad’s hometown of Fremont, Nebr.
Now he said that he would like to find them all by visiting every county courthouse in the state. He also wanted to see each courthouse out of curiosity–he loved the old architecture.
At the far left, the Mayer-Osborn elevator at Gordon, Nebr. displays the stepped, rounded head house typical of the company.
I said, “Sure, why not?” It made perfect sense to me, since I was a collector of all sorts of things, with an irresistible impulse to complete the set, whatever it happened to be. License plates sounded like a great excuse to spend time with my dad, while setting the world in order by collecting them all.
Beginning in early 2019, we started our project. We decided to photograph Dad in front of each courthouse, while surreptitiously snapping a shot of a local license plate. He had great fun Google-mapping our routes and itineraries, and over the course of the year, we completed our mission, taking several day trips and a couple of overnighters. We didn’t research any of the courthouses before we visited the county seats. Instead, we saved our first impressions for later, so each courthouse would be a surprise. Sometimes we would gasp in awe as a magnificent courthouse came into view; other times, we would sigh in disappointment.
The grain elevator in Merriman shares the characteristics of its predecessor in McCook, Nebr. and other Mayer-Osborn elevators, including its neighbor in Gordon, but we have not confirmed its builder.
Dad and I covered the entire state during our courthouse expedition, and incidentally, we crossed paths with his father Bill Osborn’s travels when we stumbled upon some of his grain elevators. Bill Osborn was based in Denver for a good part of his career as a builder, but he got back to Nebraska a few times while building elevators for Joe Tillotson and later for himself as partner in Mayer-Osborn.
Dad recognized the name of one of the elevators we encountered shortly after we visited the courthouse in Rushville, the seat of Sheridan County.
The elevator at Gordon, Nebr. (a town along Hwy. 20) had the trademark Mayer-Osborn rounded and stepped headhouse, and it followed the plan of their other larger elevators. It also sported manhole covers embossed with the name of the builder, which confirmed Dad’s thought that his father had built it. What a happy find!
Another view of the beautiful grain storage facility in Merriman, Nebr.
Its twin in neighboring Merriman, a town further east along Hwy. 20, had the same headhouse as the Gordon elevator and the same general plan as seen from the outside, but we couldn’t corroborate its origin, either by manhole cover, local attribution, or Dad’s memory. Yet we put it down as a strong maybe.
The elevator at Limon, Colo. had confounded us for a long time because of its resemblance to other Mayer-Osborn’s elevators, until we found that it was built after Bill Osborn had left the business. So there’s also a question mark over the elevator at Merriman until we can learn more.
Unfortunately our itinerary was pretty tightly planned, or we would have tried to track down someone who knew the history of the two elevators. We set the locations aside for a future visit. Now, years later, we haven’t been back, but we still have some photos to share here.
David Herbert Hatch is senior pastor at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Green Bay, Wisc. He worked slip-form construction on elevators throughout Iowa in the early to mid-1970s.
I would like to tell you a story.
Word is that one fall, after a grain elevator had serviced the community harvest, a federal inspector came for a look at the facility.
Unable to find the elevator manager, he took the liberty to climb a ladder outside a tank, all the way to the top. He opened a manhole cover, stepped through with his flashlight, and walked over the grain.
Using a re-rod, he probed around, checking the grain. Its high level in the tank at this time of year was a surprise.
“It should have gone to market by now,” he thought.
When he returned to the bottom the manager had arrived.
“Why is it that you have so much grain in the elevator?” the inspector asked.
“There’s no grain in it whatsoever,” the manager said.
He opened a steel door.
The inspector peered into an empty tank.
They shone the flashlight beam to the top and, even to the manager’s shock, saw a frozen ring of grain.
If the inspector had fallen through, with his probe, it would have been the end of his life.
David Hatch was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. Prior to college studies, Pastor Dave worked construction and had hopes of serving in law enforcement until his partial color-blindness prevented that. He did not know what to do with his life. Through God’s Providence and a phone call from his sister, who was a kindergarten teacher in Milwaukee, he enrolled in a college where, unknown to him, many of his future classmates were studying to be pastors. He received his education at Concordia College in Milwaukee; Concordia Teacher’s College, River Forest, Ill.; and Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind. His pastoral career began in 1982, following seminary, when he served as an admissions counselor at Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y. and parish pastor at Love Lutheran Church outside of Albany, N.Y.
David Herbert Hatch is senior pastor at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Green Bay, Wisc. He worked slip-form construction on elevators throughout Iowa in the early to mid-1970s.
Our operations back in the1970s had many vulnerabilities. That is, there were a lot of, “What ifs?”
The whole operation depended on a constant pour. If we had to shut down, we would have, what I remember them calling, a cold seam. That’s when the whole jacking system stopped. The concrete sat in the forms and dried, and everything had to be restarted again at a later time.
One absolutely ugly seam would be left around the perimeter of an otherwise beautiful structure. Not only that, but the drying concrete might hang up and attach itself to the forms, and they would not go up. So that’s what we tried to avoid.
Remember, I just ran a winch, and I only had hearsay. I was 18 or 19 and trying to gather information. I can only speak from what I know, and that’s not much.
What things could happen to cause such a shutdown?
What if an electrical storm lasted several hours and we had to get off the decks because we were a giant lightning rod?
What if the power went out in the city? There would be no electricity to run the jack pumps or the lights around the perimeter of the deck or to operate the electric-powered concrete vibrators!
What if only a bare-bones part of the crew showed up for work one day? Would there be enough manpower to lay the steel and push the concrete in ratio to how fast the forms had to be jacked?
What if the engine on the winch died? There was no back-up winch. (Setting the winch in place was no small matter. It had to be anchored into the ground just right, and angled perfectly so that the cable would wind properly on the spool. If the cable didn’t wrap right, it would rub against itself during wrapping and begin to fray, and then it would not be reliable.
Up on the deck was the jack house, where the jack pumps were kept. If I remember right, there were two of them, a primary and a back-up. The chance of going down, it seems, was low.
There were 1,000 other possible troubleshooting challenges. For example, concrete setting up too fast, hanging up in the form during normal operation and “pulling a hole” that would appear below as the forms began to rise. That would not stop the operation, but it sure would be a problem requiring later patching. If I remember right, the forms were oiled down prior to the start to help prevent this.
David Hatch was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. Prior to college studies, Pastor Dave worked construction and had hopes of serving in law enforcement until his partial color-blindness prevented that. He did not know what to do with his life. Through God’s Providence and a phone call from his sister, who was a kindergarten teacher in Milwaukee, he enrolled in a college where, unknown to him, many of his future classmates were studying to be pastors. He received his education at Concordia College in Milwaukee; Concordia Teacher’s College, River Forest, Ill.; and Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind. His pastoral career began in 1982, following seminary, when he served as an admissions counselor at Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y. and parish pastor at Love Lutheran Church outside of Albany, N.Y.
