Studying new and old images after my visit to Montezuma, Kan. leads to a question: What happened to the cupola?
In the 1954 photo seen above, a photo taken as Tillotson Construction Co. was finishing a 259,000-bushel storage annex for Montezuma Co-Op, we also see the 1948 main house, a twin-leg affair with 208,000-bushel capacity.
The curved cupola measured 21.5 x 47.5 x 46 feet. By reaching up nearly 170 feet, it made quite a grand statement in the small town not far from Dodge City.
An even larger annex was added later in the 1950s.
What I didn’t notice during my visit in the dark is a modified cupola, as revealed in my own smartphone photos and a contemporary look supplied by Brad Perry.
It’s clearly the same Tillotson elevator complex, but the cupola has been mutilated.
Contemporary photo by Brad Perry
It’s squared off and crowned with a red beacon. There appears to have been a conversion with the head pulleys left exposed.
Replacing a cupola would be unprecedented. Was there an accident that caused damage?
By one analysis, the trend nowadays is toward a leaner connection between farmers and export markets. By loading grain-only unit trains at facilities close to home, farmers can avoid the step of sending their grain to terminal elevators in port cities. Here, contributor Brad Perry taps his career in banking and finance to share some reflections on the increasingly large scale of elevator facilities in keeping with demand for more efficient grain handling.
Brad: Through the 1970s, we were still building 250,000-bushel workhouses and 500,000-bushel annexes, with 18- to 24-foot-diameter bins. These were being built by Jarvis, Quad States, Jordan, Mid States, and a few others. That makes me really appreciate the 354,000-bushel houses your family built in 1954.
Ronald: They built 350,000 bushels at Farnsworth, Tex. in 1946!
Brad: Farmers Coop Business Association, of Shelby, Neb. built maybe the first “corn-soybean” elevator in Nebraska. It had 750,000 bushel capacity, four tanks measuring 48 feet in diameter with interstices. It was designed for export unit-train loading. This was followed by the Tamora-Staplehurst Cooperative (in Seward County, Neb.) building a 1-million-plus-bushel facility. After that, it took us a while, but we figured out that larger bins maybe made sense! Now as you look across Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and South Dakota, you see 105-foot-diameter steel bins of 750,000-bushel capacity and now 120-foot-diameter bins (1.2 million plus). For concrete, Tamora, Neb. is a great example. Hooked to the elevator is a 400,000-bushel tank, a 600,000-bushel tank, and now a 1-million-bushel tank.
Tillotson’s classic elevator at Pocahontas, Iowa, by Brad Perry
Brad: It’s been much more difficult for Kansas cooperatives to unify for the benefit of their producer-owners. There are several reasons including the terminal grain structure. There is plenty of shipping capacity for trains in Kansas, but it’s at the terminal rather than close to the producer. This has been changing with the new shuttle loaders that have been built in the state. Some of the most significant ones (Courtland, Frankfort, Hanover, Canton) were either built by Nebraska cooperatives or as joint ventures with larger companies.
Ronald: I’m turning to the internet for a definition: A shuttle loader is a high-capacity industrial machine used to rapidly transfer bulk materials such as grain into 100-car freight trains. Here’s the link to a scholarly paper co-authored by CoBank Research Fellow Mykel Taylor of Kansas State University that addresses the question of efficiency.
Brad: I was involved with four grain-marketing LLCs and joint ventures where several cooperatives combined their grain operations into a single license. A central staff did all of the merchandising, set the bids, did the grain accounting and managed grain flows. Net grain revenues were then passed back to the member-owner cooperatives based on bushels handled at each facility. These organizations were AgMark at Concordia, Kan., Team Marketing at Moundridge, Kan., CoMark in southern Kansas, and Equity Marketing Alliance at Enid, Okla. AgMark still exists, with CVA (Central Valley Ag) at York, Neb. as the dominant owner. Team Marketing has dissolved. CoMark and Equity Marketing have merged. In hindsight, while the groups substantially improved producers’ grain bids and cooperative earnings, they also allowed the member-cooperatives to resist change.
Rail car mover
Ronald: What strikes me is that the elevators themselves are the emblems of these organizations that otherwise have few physical manifestations.
Brad: There was another joint marketing group proposed for western Kansas. This included the cooperatives at Syracuse, Johnson, Elkhart, and Ulysses. The entity that materialized from those discussions was similar … but different. ADM Grain got involved and a whole new structure evolved that included the cooperatives (less Elkhart) and what were ADM/Collingwood facilities in western and southwestern Kansas. This included the ADM facilities in Johnson’s trade area, and a bunch further south, including Hugoton, the seat of Stevens County. Over time, several more cooperatives merged in.
Trouble at Sunray, Brad Perry photoMore trouble at Sunray, Brad Perry photo
Brad: I was told once that it took as many as 12 employees to load a train at one of the monster Kansas terminals. That means one in the locomotive or a smaller car mover; another two or three opening and then closing car hatches; two others in the headhouse running a hopper scale that prints tickets; a grader; one boss supervising everything; and at least four on bicycles in the tunnel beneath the storage annex. The tunnel guys are getting their instructions via radio from the boss, and being told, “Crack open bin 118 a quarter turn.” They are actually blending coming out of the annex bins onto the belt. It takes several days to load a 110-car train out of most of these monsters.
Ronald: You had mentioned in a previous discussion that, at the country elevators, it was a couple of boxcars at a time.
Brad: Modern train loaders? Three or maybe four employees load a 110-car train in 12 hours. There’s one in the locomotive, one or 2 opening and closing hatches, and one in a control booth half-way up the side of the elevator. If it’s being shipped with origin USDA grades, then there is also a USDA grader on site. The employee in the booth is controlling the entire elevator— legs, gates, conveyors, etc.
Ronald: In a photo I took at Springfield, Colo., I didn’t know what to call the grotesque appendage at the end of the annex, marring the beautiful Tillotson elevator. This appendage incorporated a booth. You informed me it was for grain loading.
Ronald: You were impressed when reader Michael Petersen utilized AI to I.D. the unlabeled photo of an elevator, which turned out to be Tillotson’s job at Helena, Okla.
Brad: Glad the Helena mystery was solved! I looked— been there but didn’t have any pictures. The current view from Google Earth is very typical of Kansas and Oklahoma elevators. The co-op added a McPherson jump-form tank at the end and put a leg and another dump between the annex and McPherson tank. The tank is probably 200,000 to 250,000 capacity. I’m betting the leg is either 7,500 or 10,000 bushels per hour.
Ronald: Some additional studies of the construction record show that Tillotson returned twice to Helena, each time to build more storage.
Brad: This high-speed approach has been both good and bad. It’s the standard approach that companies like Scoular have used to upgrade to shuttle-train-loading capability. In their case, it’s normally a 30,000-bph leg with a bulk weigher. You can see this at Downs, in north-central Kansas, Venango in southwestern Nebraska, and additional locations. The bad side is, many slip-formed tubes weren’t designed with enough bearing pressure for this speed of loading. I’ve seen major holes blown right out through the side of the tube that these higher capacity legs were dumping into.
If a wood elevator ever looked toylike, it was the one in Elkhart, Kan. As seen in an aerial photo, it resembles a model railroader’s prop.
In 1946, Tillotson Construction Co. built an imposing 212,500-bushel elevator of reinforced concrete as part of a post-World War Two building boom. As in the auto industry, which stopped building passenger cars and light trucks for more than three years, scarce resources curtailed activities in the civilian construction sector until the troops were coming home.
Tillotson had built five elevators in 1941, none in 1942 and 1943, and one in 1944.
By 1945, the Omaha company regathered its crews to build seven elevators in 1945–all in Oklahoma and Texas. The next year, there were at least seven more. One was in Wellsburg, Iowa; four were in Oklahoma, and two in Kansas: Ensign (240,000 bushels) and Elkhart. By that time, Tillotson–which started building concrete elevators in 1939–had already built seven elevators, all in Oklahoma and Texas, of greater than 200,000-bushel capacity. The largest of them was a whopping 340,000 bushels at Farnsworth, Tex. The ability to go upscale with the concept and execution of these elevators remains impressive more than eighty years later.
Tillotson hired Potter Studio, of Lamar, Colo., for an aerial shot of Elkhart. On Facebook, I found a post by Timothy K. Coy, who wrote:
My grandmother, her husband Gerald and my parents S.D. and Bette Coy, operated Potter Studio in Lamar from about 1946 to 1955, when Elizabeth Potter retired and the business was sold.
The aerial job must have been one of the studio’s first important commissions.
I have Page 1 of the construction record but lack Page 1A with full specs. Nevertheless, we know Elkhart was built on the revised plan established in Medford, Okla. in 1941. The record isn’t entirely specific about Medford, but I think there were 10 tanks measuring 15.5 feet in diameter and 22 bins. I have no information on whether the job included the office and service buildings.
Until 1945, the record included costs. Medford was built for $41,289.37. While the total isn’t available for Elkhart, there’s a note that the labor rate was 80 cents per hour, with overtime ringing in at $1.25.
Elkhart is situated along U.S. 56 in the southwestern corner of Kansas, bordering Oklahoma’s Panhandle. On our road trip, we were unable to detour to Elkhart but did go to Satanta, which is about 60 miles northwest on that road. The Satanta elevator is one of the first, or perhaps the very first, where Tillotson rounded the corners of the cupola. This Elkhart elevator is a good example of the early rectangular style.
I wish there were more to say about Elkhart but can point out that it previously came up more than a decade ago in a post on this blog. I’d chatted with a California neighbor and learned she had just visited Elkhart. She shared pictures, taken from the car, of “a funny building.”
What was a novelty to her was an awe-inspiring symbol of progress to the people of Morton County, Kansas in 1946, leaving the wood elevator next door to sing the Cimarron Valley Outmoded Blues.
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.
