With its namesake in Ireland, the town of Clare, Iowa brings to mind leprechauns and four-leaf clovers. With its dwarfish cupola and four tanks, the Tillotson elevator there suits the tenor of the town.
It’s one of Tillotson Construction’s orphans, as Kristen Cart put it in an earlier post. “Orphan designs were unique storage plans, made to meet unusual customer needs.” she wrote.
Built in 1949, this single-leg 88,800-bushel elevator is unique in the Tillotson catalog. It towers above its setting at the eastern edge of an impact crater, one created when a 10-billion-ton asteroid struck millions of years ago; yet it’s among the company’s lesser concrete elevators. For the sake of comparison, consider that, at the same time as this job in Webster County, there was also a 310,000-bushel elevator project in Dalhart, Tex.
Clare’s new concrete elevator joined two wood elevators and at least two-dozen gleaming metal bins that were well within reach of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway.
The town had fewer than 200 people, and elevator construction in this obscure location didn’t merit coverage in the newspaper from Fort Dodge, the county seat and largest town. What we know about the elevator is from Tillotson’s records:
Four tanks measuring 15.5 feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height
46 x 36 slab
800 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, 18 tons of plain concrete for hopper
36.8 tons of reinforcing steel
18-inch main slab
4,530 tons gross weight loaded
13 x 19 x 12 cupola
Pulley centers 138.0 feet apart
While finding nothing on elevator construction, we did learn from the Fort Dodge Messenger & Chronicle that in December of 1949, not long after the elevator’s completion, the co-op held its annual meeting:
“The Farmers Co-op elevator held the annual meeting recently, at which time the following members were elected to the board of directors for a period of three years: Tom Crilly, Julius Albrecht and Walter Seltz. Mr. Seltz was also elected president of the Co-op.”
The Clare co-op merged into New Cooperative in 1978, and a recent photo indicates the Tillotson elevator’s luck is holding.
Six years after building a 102,000-bushel single-leg concrete elevator for the Farmers Cooperative Elevator Co. of Churdan, Iowa, Tillotson Construction Co. returned to that village in 1955 for a storage annex.
That meant another 198,960 bushels of capacity in six tanks. Each one measured 20 feet in diameter and reached 105 feet in height. The run was 16 x 62.5 x 8.
The project started on July 11, and the the continuous pour was expected to last about two weeks.
Photo by Kristen Cart in 2014
To have space for the annex, the co-op purchased a house that sat just to the west of the elevator. The Jefferson Bee reported on March 22 that the house was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Ray Stream. The occupants, Mr. and Mrs. John Lundy and Barbara, had but short notice about moving. Work on the annex was to start around April 1.
It seems the Lundys relocated elsewhere in Churdan and continued with life as normal. The Jefferson Herald reported Aug. 4 that Mr. and Mrs. Lundy and Barbara were Sunday dinner guests of Mr. and Mrs. Stream, who evidently wanted to make up for uprooting their former tenants.
And the Lundys continued to live the good life. On Sept. 1, it was reported they had visited the Iowa State Fair.
Villagers in Churdan, Iowa marveled that the new concrete elevator going up in the spring of 1949 would be even taller than the water tower.
Work on the single-leg 102,000-bushel structure started on Monday, May 23. It was estimated the continuous pour would be finished in two weeks, by Monday June 6.
Tillotson Construction Co. won the contract to build the elevator for Farmers Cooperative Elevator Co. of Churdan. The village in Greene County, located in west-central Iowa, had a population of about 600 people. The venerable co-op dated from 1912, according to available records.
The Churdan Plan consisted of four tanks measuring 14.5 feet in diameter and reaching 100 feet in height. With dimensions of 17 x 34 x 22, the curved cupola would definitively crown the elevator. This element was labeled on two sides with “Farmers Co-Op Elevator” in black letters.
Photo from the Jefferson (Iowa) Herald, June 2, 1949
Tillotson used the Churdan plan for at least six additional country elevators between 1949 and 1952
Kristen Cart visited Churdan in 2014 and created a post (link here) with all dimensions and specifications. She noted:
“It is immediately obvious that the old Tillotson structure has been updated at some time in the past with a leg that extends above the headhouse, thereby keeping the machinery most prone to overheating far from accumulations of grain dust.”
A gallery of her photos is seen below.
A Tillotson crew returned in 1955 to build 198,960-bushel storage annex. A follow-up post will include details of this project.
Quad States arrived in 1969 to add another elevator, this one with a stepped headhouse.
Expansion of Farmers Cooperative Association grain storage at Boyden, Iowa culminated with a 246,870-bushel single-leg concrete elevator in 1955.
This came after a series of moves by the co-op on a timeline that’s hard to pin down. One June 8, 1950, Henry De Groot, secretary, placed this ad in the Boyden Reporter:
“The Board of Directors and the help wish to thank the stockholders for the wonderful support received on the subscription of preferred stock for the new Elevator. The goal of $90,000 was reached before Saturday evening of June 3. The Board of Directors will do everything in their power to have the construction completed before government delivery begins. Thank you again for your very fine support.”
Mr. De Groot likely refers to the building for flat storage or milling, as seen in the ad, below, which appeared in the Reporter on Nov. 9, 1950.
There were also also four cylindrical tanks with a rectangular cupola. Whatever the chronology and purpose of this collection of structures, there was still insufficient capacity at Boyden until Tillotson Construction Co. came along in 1955, as we find in the company records.
Alas, I find no mention of the new elevator in the newspaper.
The Tillotson elevator had eight tanks measuring 18 feet in diameter and reaching 117 feet in height. Here are other dimensions and capacities:
Main slab 64.5 x 77.5 feet, 4,856 square feet (Tillotson’s measurement) or 4,998.75 (my measure)
2,343 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, 57 cubic yards plain concrete for hopper
121.03 tons of steel
13,108 tons gross weight loaded
Pit depth 15.0 feet
The construction record has an unusual number of notes about the job, which I interpret to my best ability.
The first note indicates there was a two-foot additional slab projection and three inches added to the thickness, which consumed 78 cubic yards of concrete.
A second note refers to 17.0 cubic yards for a “saucer,” which I can’t explain. An elaboration mentions “aeration tubes” and “previous hot spot.”
There was an outside basement door. This well-featured elevator also had a cleaner floor. Yet another note says “Split Bins 13 & 14, 24 cu. yd., 6 bin.” There was a 22-inch pad under the boot pit and 15-inch pad under (each?) wing pit. A final reference is to an “outside dust house.”
The Google Street View photos shows the 71-year-old elevator still in the thick of things on behalf of Boyden farmers.
While I learned no more about construction of the Boyden concrete elevator, nor its social history, I did pick up one item from Oct. 13, 1955 that may be of interest. Richard Burggraaf, a Boyden farmer, and his Holstein cow named Burg Ormsby Veeman Segis Gay, achieved a one-year production record of 16,563 pounds of milk with 657 pounds of butterfat. The Holstein-Friesian Association of America certified the record after Iowa State College supervised the weighing and testing.
It’s also of significance that in October of 1957, the seventh grade class visited Burggraaf’s home, and he showed them his stamp collection.
A windy night of calamity in the summer of 1958 claimed the life of James George Russell.
As foreman of the overnight crew that started work on Friday, July 25, Jim rode the slip and was measuring the progress of the 250,000-bushel elevator that Tillotson Construction Co. had undertaken at Murphy, six miles west of Aurora, Nebr.
The wind caught Jim’s measuring tape, which was made of steel, and blew it into a 2.200-volt power line. The shock knocked him off the formwork, and the young man fell sixty feet. He died early Saturday morning, July 26, at the Aurora hospital.
Born in 1936, Jim was fourteen years old at the time of the 1950 census. By then, William and Alma Russell had eight sons. The entire family was involved in elevator construction.
“We lived in Vermillion, South Dakota, but that summer I was in Aurora,” Dennis Russell recalled in a 2013 interview. “We were staying with Dad. I remember Mom taking that phone call.”
So many mothers had received similar calls during wartime. Now, thirteen years after the war’s end, Alma had lost her son to this accident.
Jim’s father William, born in 1900, had done construction of ammunition depots during World War Two. Known as Bill, he went to work for Tillotson Construction Co. after the War.
“He worked for them a long time,” Dennis said. “He left Tillotson’s and started Mid-States Construction Company with Gordon Erickson and another individual. I think he was a partner for a brief period and then ran jobs for them as a superintendent until his retirement.”
Bill retired in 1972, but he “always had fond memories working for Tillotson, I know that,” Dennis said. “I remember he was awful fond of Mary.”
First load of grain being dumped at Alta, Iowa. Elevator employee, left, Bill Russell, right. Worker, left, and Bill Russell, right Bill Russell, left, unknown man on right Tillotson Construction’s Bill Russell, far right, instructs (from left) Stanley Kittleson, Adrian Dahl, and Merlynn Nelson on operation of the elevator’s distributor controls.
Dennis recalled that, at his death, Jim had one year of law school remaining at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. He was married to Shirley, a nurse.
Our search turns up this obituary:
“When James George Russell was born in 1936, in South Dakota, his father, William Ruston Russell, Jr., was 36 and his mother, Alma O. Nelson, was 26. He lived in United States in 1949 and Vermillion, Clay County, South Dakota in 1950. He died on 26 July 1958, at the age of 22, and was buried in Vermillion.”
Jim enrolled in the university’s ROTC program. He and other South Dakota men received six weeks of training at Fort Riley, Kan. The training included weapons, tactics, and bivouac.
Ten months later, in May of 1957, he was commissioned second lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Transportation Corps. We have no information on active-duty service.
The aerial photo at the top of this post was provided by Kurtis Glinn. It shows Tillotson Construction’s Murphy elevator, probably in the early 1960s. Note the ground storage of grain sorghum on the right.
“I was the manager at the Aurora Cooperative Murphy location in central Nebraska,” Kurt Glinn said. “I was told from the old timers in the area that were around when the elevator was built in the late-’50s [that an] accident happened there, shutting down construction for about a week.”
Our search turns up no photo of Jim Russell but we hope still to find one to complete a proper tribute to this man of obvious diligence and high character whose promise was cut short by a freak accident.
In the first part of 1955, Bud Lane, manager of the Farmers Cooperative Elevator Co. in Boxholm, Iowa, told Farmers’ Elevator Guide that construction of the concrete elevator would be finished by July 15. It would join a complex of three wood elevators and a mill.
Tillotson Construction Co. of Omaha built the concrete elevator on the same plan used in 1950 at Drummond, Okla.
Boxholm, a central-Iowa town of Swedish immigrants, was served from 1906 by the Newton and Northwestern Railroad, which later became the Fort Dodge, Des Moines & Southern. Origins of the grain-storage complex dated back to the early 1900s.
The Boxholm elevator had eight tanks measuring 15.5 feet in diameter and rising to 120 feet in height. All other specs are listed in our earlier post that includes original photos by Kristen.
Frank Nine worked on the Boxholm job and shared these recollections: “Early 1955 we started the job in Boxholm, Iowa, where I met Jim Sheets, and we became friends. I worked the master jacks and run jack crew. Later on, finished cement with Jim–among other jobs as needed. This is where George, Jay, and an old welder, Jesse, became friends.”
The Farmers’ Co-operative of Newell, Iowa needed a replacement for their wood elevator, which had burned in September of 1953. When Tillotson Construction Co. built a concrete giant for them the next spring, the need for a replacement was met.
It happened when the trend across Iowa was to increase storage.
The Farmers Grain Dealers Association reported 10.5 million bushels of new capacity were being added statewide.
In Des Moines, the state capital, a 5.0-million-bushel structure was under construction.
Twenty-five other locations from Albert City to Woodstock accounted for the other 5.25 million bushels. Among them, the largest job was at Ellsworth: a 500,000-bushel concrete elevator.
Besides Newell, Tillotson was busy in Albert City, Iowa Falls, Pocahontas, Rockwell City, Dayton, and Goldfield. With capacity of 150,000 bushels, the Newell elevator was one of the smallest projects in the state. Smaller still, two locations, Titonka and Sutherland, were building wood annexes of 75,000 and 70,000 bushels respectively.
Newell measurements and dimensions:
Built on the Manson plan with five tanks, each measuring 16 feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height for a capacity of 150,000 bushels, 15 bins and overflow, dust bin over driveway. A special note says bin #9 was split.
Page 8 of the Tillotson Construction Co. record documents the stretch through 1954 when the company participated in the boom for large-scale reinforced-concrete grain-storage buildings, completing eight main-house elevators and eight storage annexes.
The Omaha company led by Reginald O. Tillotson and Mary V. Tillotson produced 3,789,055 bushels of new capacity in this period. Jobs were in five states: Nebraska (1), Kansas (2), Iowa (8), Oklahoma (4), Texas (1).
Here’s the complete list of the sixteen locations: Bellwood, Nebr.; Ensign and Montezuma, Kan.; Dacoma, Orienta, Weatherford, and Lahoma, Okla.; Booker, Tex.; Newell, Iowa Falls, Albert City, Glidden, Manson, Pocahontas, Goldfield, and Rockwell City, Iowa.
Bellwood was the most ambitious storage project. Each of the ten tanks measured 20 feet in diameter and reached 130 feet in height.
The smallest commission was at Newell, Iowa, where the new 150,000-bushel elevator had five tanks measuring sixteen feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet in height.
A similar job left Manson, Iowa with a 152,000-bushel elevator, also with five tanks measuring sixteen feet in diameter and reaching 120 feet.
Bellwood, Nebr. in 2020
Bellwood, Nebr. in 2020
We have visited Bellwood, Pocahontas, and Booker and can share file photos. The dawn photo at the top of this post is from Booker in 2018.
Pocahontas aerial view
A Ford F-500 on the driveway at Dacoma, Okla. Photo by Brad Perry.
Because of the out-of-the-way locations of these country elevators, and because of the secondary importance of storage annexes, little attention or acclaim was given and it’s hard to find documentation in archived newspapers.
Inside the Booker elevatorBooker from the outsideBooker detail
Concerning the Orienta job, the Enid Morning News reported on Jan. 24, 1954:
“Work is progressing rapidly on the 300,000 bushel addition to the Major County Co-op Elevator association’s plant at Orienta, in Major county west of Enid. When [the annex is] completed sometime in March the association will have a storage capacity of 630,000 bushels, according to Ray Fuzzell, veteran manager. The addition is being constructed by the Tillotson Construction Co., of Omaha, on a cost plus basis with limit of $123,000. The association has had an elevator at Orienta since 1917. ‘We just did not have the storage capacity to take care of our local needs,’ Fuzzell said in commenting on the addition. ‘We do not expect to ship in any wheat for storage.'”
The 1954 Oklahoma wheat crop was huge. The Associated Press reported a “spectacular boom” in elevator construction, with “pounding hammers and whirring concrete mixers” as 35 to 40 co-operatives added 9 million bushels of storage capacity. Dacoma was one of seven locations in the state where quarter-million-bushel jobs were underway.
Tillotson Construction was an important constituent in this movement, a leading innovator with its own distinctive architectural style and many characteristic features.
At one of the highest points in Iowa, a Tillotson elevator faced down its peers.
Ocheyedan (pronounced oh-CHEED-an) is today a town of 421 residents in Osceola County, northwest Iowa. It is situated near the Ocheyedan Mound, which rises 170 feet above the surrounding plain.
Robert K. Reiste, publisher of the Ocheyedan Press, once wrote that people thought the Mound was an Indian burial grounds until geologists determined it’s a “kame.” Eskers and kames are somewhat similar glacial deposits. This ancient kame is composed of sand, gravel, and boulders.
“Ocheyedan Mound is one of the most beautiful hills in the northwest part of the state, and its outline can be seen for miles in all directions,” Reiste wrote in 1951. He gave the town’s population as 712 residents and pinned the Mound’s elevation at 1,675 feet above sea level.
Reiste makes no mention that the Mound first got a run for its money the year before his report appeared. Tillotson Construction Co. came to town in 1950 and reached towards the heavens with a single-leg grain elevator rated at 267,413 bushels of capacity.
It was one of three Iowa jobs completed around the same time and using the same plan with eight tanks each measuring 18 feet in diameter. The Ocheyedan variation was to increase the height of the drawform walls from 115 to 120 feet. With a cupola measuring 23 x 60 x 40 feet, the pristine grain house stood pretty much head to head with the Mound a couple of miles away.
Construction work had started early in the summer of 1950. The Globe, of Worthington, Minn., reported the Ocheyedan Co-operative Elevator Association would hold its annual meeting on June 27. Don Edison of the Iowa Farmers Grain Dealers Association was guest speaker. Edison traveled around Iowa for such occasions. In 1951, the Des Moines Register even reported on his goodwill trip to Mexico, where he learned about the work of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers and about the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of President Truman’s “Point Four” foreign-policy program of sharing scientific knowledge, including agricultural practices.
Detail view of Ocheyedan Farmers Co-operative elevator in 1950
The Globe’s report on elevator construction continued:
“Meanwhile, excavation work is proceeding and form building is under way for the new 250,000-bushel concrete elevator now being put up by the co-operative, to be completed in early September. Webb Welty, Pond Creek, Okla., is superintending operations for the Tillotson Construction company, Omaha, contractors.”
Pond Creek was a Tillotson job in 1946, and we surmise that Webb Welty joined the company then. In its Pond Creek news summary, The Medford Patriot Star and Grant County Journal ran the following item on Sept. 26, 1946:
We lack any record of an elevator at Elkhart, Texas, but Tillotson also built at Elkhart, Kan. in 1946.
Back in Ocheyedan, The Globe published a follow-up report on Aug. 8:
“Construction of the eight cylindrical tanks of the new 250,000-bushel concrete elevator of the Farmers Co-operative Elevator company was completed Saturday noon. The crew, directed by Webb Welty, foreman, is now removing the slip form which rode the job from the foundation to the full height of the tanks, 120 feet above grade. Work was carried [out] on a 24-hour daily schedule for approximately two weeks. In the course of another 10 days, work will begin on the head house which will tower another 40 feet above the bins. Manager Ernest Wellhausen of the elevator co-operative said it is expected the plant will be in shape to receive its first grain the latter part of September.”
“I think my Uncle Wade Arend helped build it as a young man,” Karl Arend wrote on the Facebook page Ocheyedan: A Place We Call Home. “Heard stories about the ride up and down on the cable pulleys.”
Hometown newspapers make it easy to follow Wade after his elevator work. With Frederick Glade and William Weaver, he was one of three Ocheyedan lads who attended South Dakota State, and he was in Army ROTC. He became a high school teacher in Lime Springs, Iowa until being called to active duty at Fort Benning, Ga. After service with the Army Engineers, where he was a lieutenant, he returned to Brookings, S.D. for six weeks at the college. Then he went off to Fairbanks, Ak. and taught science at the junior high school level. Receiving a National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate study, he had decided to attend Michigan State University.
We leave off Wade’s story at that point to return to Ocheyedan.
The concrete elevator went up between two wood elevators already standing in Ocheyedan.
The elevator at left in the aerial photo (top of post) wears the co-op’s label. The other elevator, seen at right in the same photo, is labeled E.A. Brown Co. (Inset views of both elevators are embedded in the body of this post.) Edward A. Brown was an entrepreneur who owned dozens of elevators in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa.
Here are some basic specifications of Tillotson’s Ocheyedan elevator:
2,255 cubic yards of reinforced concrete
49.6 cubic yards plain concrete for hoppers
115.34 tons of reinforcing steel
60 x 73.5-foot slab 24 inches thick and 4,101 square feet
13,635 tons gross weight loaded
23 x 60 x 40-foot cupola
pulley centers 165.5 feet apart
120-foot drawform walls
One source says a dedication ceremony was held Oct. 5, 1950, although further details are unavailable. For additional information and construction-progress photos from Ocheyedan, visit the Towns and Nature blog for the post “Ocheyedan, IA: Early Slip Form Grain Elevator with Construction Photos.”
When Harper and Bowers wanted to expand their grain operation in Estill, S.C., they went with Midwestern expertise. Stiles Harper and Grover Bowers were on the cotton side of things upon founding their company in 1947 but branched out in the early 1950s as South Carolina farmers found success with double cropping. Grain followed by soybeans was a development that sent the producers looking for sufficient storage and handling.
To foster this new practice, Harper and Bowers sponsored a soybean-growing contest. The winners for the 1953 crop were a father-son team, R.C. and Bobby Deloach, the boy being a 4-H club member,. They harvested 36 bushels per acre. Deemed a success, the contest was renewed for 1954.
Stiles Harper was an Estill native who attended the University of South Carolina. He was 37 years old when he cofounded Harper and Bowers, Inc. Besides leading efforts in soybean processing by cofounding Southern Soya Corp., he also advocated for pine tree plantations and was named South Carolina Tree Farmer of the Year in 1977.
Grover Bowers, Jr. was a University of South Carolina graduate who fought with the Marines in the Pacific Theater during World War Two, achieving the rank of captain. He served one term in the South Carolina senate and in 1978 received the Order of the Palmetto, the state’s highest civilian honor.
Burrell elevator, 1951
The first Harper and Bowers elevator, with 125,000-bushels capacity, was built in 1951 by Thomas L. Burrell, Inc. of Indianapolis. Then the partners commissioned Tillotson Construction Co. of Omaha to put up a 225,000-bushel storage annex in 1952.
The next year, Tillotson was back to build a companion elevator, a 334,000-bushel twin-leg job with a striking curved cupola that added 50 additional feet to the Lowcountry skyline. The expansion enabled Harper and Bowers to accommodate the needs of area farmers, a point that’s elaborated in an article from The Press and Standard on Oct. 15, 1953:
A 1954 news report indicated Harper and Bowers planned a storage annex to join the Tillotson elevator, further increasing capacity at Estill to 1 million bushels.
Kristen visited the location in 2014 and took the pictures seen with post.
Key specifications on the two Tillotson jobs are listed here:
225,000-bushel annex in 1952:
9 tanks measuring 18 feet in diameter and reaching 108.5 feet in height.
Full basement
Upper run measuring 14.0 x 93.0 feet
Belt conveyors, 20-inch belt at bottom and 24-inch belt at top
13 internal bins
1,509 tons of reinforced-concrete, 25 more tons for hoppers
75.27 tons of steel
Slab 50 x 78.5 feet, 21 inches thick
9,582 tons gross weight loaded
334,000-bushel twin-leg elevator in 1953
10 tanks measuring 18 feet in diameter and rising 120 feet
21 bins
2,620 tons of reinforced concrete, 63 more tons for hoppers
