Tag Archives: innovation

Horizontal member on Hereford elevator adds civilizing touch for employees

by baggyparagraphs

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As we see in these photos from Hereford, Texas, a Tillotson elevator is more than just a collection of tanks and the mechanisms to move grain around inside the structure.

Texas-Okla Logo 04A Tillotson elevator can also come with amenities.

Here we see a lintel above the rear door of the main house. A lintel is a horizontal member that usually bears a load above an opening.

I asked Uncle Chuck Tillotson about it. (He’s also known in these posts as Charles J. Tillotson, son of Reginald Tillotson, of Tillotson Construction Co.)

He responded: “These concrete ‘eyebrows,’ or ‘headers,’ were added above doorways sometimes to provide a bit of shielding from the rainfall sheet flow coming down the vertical face of the wall over the doorway/opening in a rainstorm.”

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So it’s a thoughtful touch. An employee won’t get water down his neck when he opens the door. Think of the increased productivity!

“They were not poured integrally with the concrete bin wall during slipping but were added afterwards,” Uncle Chuck continued.

Not only is there the lintel but also the electric light. I saw the same combination over and over at the Tillotson elevators I visited in the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma.

“I don’t recall these eyebrows being standard elements,” Uncle C. says. “I think they were added after the fact but whether Tillotson did the work, or the owner, I’m not sure.”

We do think the electric light was a standard item.

In the uppermost photo, the iron or steel hook and dangling cable remain a bit of a mystery, though.

And the rabbit-eared paintwork is beyond guessing.

Handsome in Hereford, Texas, a Tillotson elevator remains in use

by baggyparagraphs

IMG_8842On my road trip to visit my grandfather Reginald Tillotson’s elevators, the first stop was Hereford, Texas. It was toward the end of my second day of driving from California, and I arrived in time for late-afternoon light.

Texas-Okla Logo 04I had departed I-40 on the north and came down U.S. 385 for 28 miles through Deaf Smith County.

The desert scrub ends rather suddenly in the Texas Panhandle, and I found myself amid prosperous-looking farmsteads and cropland irrigated by center-pivots. It looked like corn, wheat, and cotton predominated.

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Driveway detail view.

Hereford, which is southwest of Amarillo, is one stinky town. People said it’s because of huge surrounding feedlots. They sounded proud about it.

There were a couple of enormous grain terminals on the horizon as I approached. The Tillotson elevator was evident to their left. It was the smaller one, but the unique curved headhouse gave away its identity.

I drove east on U.S. 60 to what Google Maps identifies as the East End Hereford Grain Corp., which is across the railroad tracks on Dairy Road.

Tillotson Construction Co. built this 300,000-bushel elevator in 1951. Records show it had six tanks, or silos, of 20 feet in diameter. Notes say “Leg-Tunnel-Gallery” and “Top & Bot 30″ belts.”

A semi-truck lift and attached drive were also included.

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The elevator looked to be in pretty good shape. There are some horizontal cracks on the silos, but they had been filled in. On the headhouse, traces of letters appeared to say Freeman Grain Corp. The concrete elevator towered over 10 barrel-like steel silos and an ungainly superstructure, along with bins and hoppers that linked to the concrete elevator’s headhouse by means of a spindly looking line.

This kind of annex was in a way preferable to a series of concrete silos. The Hereford elevator is a nice, free-standing example of Tillotson’s signature style.

The elevator’s tanks are 125 feet high. The headhouse, or cupola, is 17 feet wide, 36.75 feet long, and 27 feet high. So the structure reaches 152 feet up. 

Embossed manhole cover with Tillotson Construction Co., Omaha, Neb.
A clear message in a homespun style.
Heavy-duty spouting on the sunny side of the elevator

No one was around, so I helped myself to photos. The only distractions came when trains went by. 

I was famished after the long day on the road, so I knocked off when I had my photos and checked in at the Hereford Inn just across East 1st Street. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, it was a pretty crummy place.

But after dining at Dakota’s Steakhouse (smothered fried chicken: $10.83), I went back to the motel and slept well despite the fact that the trains seemed to be crossing through the room.

Texas and Oklahoma road trip takes us to 20 elevators (so get ready)

by baggyparagraphs

By Ronald Ahrens

This Ford Ranger violated Tesla parking en route to Texas and Oklahoma.

Get ready for a series of posts on Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators.

On April 15, I set out on a road trip to the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma to see elevators built there between 1939 and the mid-1950s by Tillotson Construction Co.

This was a long-desired destination, as my grandfather, Reginald Tillotson, and his brother Joe Tillotson (until their partnership dissolved), built at least 10 reinforced-concrete elevators in the Panhandle and closer to 20 in Oklahoma. 

Texas-Okla Logo 04The company’s first concrete elevator, dating to 1939, was built in Goltry, Okla., and I was able to visit it.

So as I say, get ready.

I have 410 photos on one memory card and haven’t even counted those on the other card that’s still in the camera.

I saw a nice range of elevators including a surprise Mayer-Osborn one in Follett, Texas–built by my partner Kristen Osborn Cart’s grandfather after he worked for my grandfather.

Our Grandfathers’ Grain Elevators gets inside the main house at Booker, Texas.

I got inside some elevators, met interesting people whom you will also meet, and even have a few trip notes to share.

For example, avoid the Hereford Inn, in Hereford, Texas. Yes, it’s right across the street from the Tillotson elevator. No, you shouldn’t stay there. The owners have done nothing to update the rooms; flimsy mattress, wilted pillow, skimpy towel. And it sounded like the trains were coming through the room. At least there was hot water.

For the same $60 price, I stayed the next night at the Nursanickel Motel in Spearman, Texas. That place was quite nice and cast its shadow on the dump in Hereford.

And here’s a culinary tip: Smrcka’s Dairy Shack, in Medford, Oklahoma, serves a fantastic Czech sausage sandwich with sauerkraut. And the fries are incredible.

The Czech sausage sandwich in question.

With limeade, it came to $8.38.

If you have the same counter-attendant that I had, don’t try to make small talk because she’s super-crabby.

So stay with us for our Texas-Oklahoma series over the next few weeks.

A small Missouri company has big plans for idle elevators to serve as vertical farms

by baggyparagraphs
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Vertical Innovations’ first vertical farm is planned for this elevator. Photos courtesy of Vertical Innovations.

By Ronald Ahrens

Jim Kerns and David Geisler called up the other day from Springfield, Missouri, to ask a question of our readers: Are you aware of any municipally owned, abandoned grain elevators?

Kerns and Geisler run Vertical Innovations, an enterprise formed in December of 2014 to repurpose old elevators, making them into incredibly productive vertical farms for growing leafy green vegetables. They have developed a patent-pending method of hydroponic production, a “structure-driven design” that adapts to the circular shapes.

“The silos tell us what to do,” said Kerns, who has a background in organic farming and leads the company’s innovation, design and construction efforts. “I see them as giant environmental control structures, giant concrete radiators.”

Significant energy savings can result from implementation of circular shapes, which among other things require far less lighting and the corresponding energy use, he said.

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Jim Kerns explores elevator guts.

David Geisler, CEO and general counsel, has worked out a lease for a disused elevator in downtown Springfield.

For its next steps, the company has targeted an available elevator in South Hutchinson, Kan., and approached the owner of Tillotson Construction Co.’s Vinton Street elevator in Omaha.

“What an awesome facility,” Geisler wrote in a follow-up email, thinking of Vinton Street.

Geisler and Kerns have cast their eyes far beyond the Midwest, though, from big terminals in Buffalo, N.Y., to San Francisco’s threatened Pier 92.

“We really need to save that facility if it’s structurally sound,” Kerns said. “It could put out about 50 million pounds of green leafy vegetables per year.”

Pier 92 San Francisco (1)Their most unique discovery source is YouTube videos posted by those who have flown drones around elevators.

But word-of-mouth works, too, and Kerns issues this appeal to readers: “Submit to us pictures and locations of concrete grain terminals in good condition all across the United States, sea to shining sea, north to south.”

Vertical Innovations can be contacted through its website.