This Mayer-Osborn oddity in Cordell, Okla. was only built once for a customer with specialized needs

Story and photos by Kristen Cart

In the last post, we checked out two of Tillotson Construction Company’s earliest designs and their derivatives. In the 1940s, many elevator plans departed substantially from Tillotson’s first efforts, and they had plan names of their own. Some of those elevators were one-of-a-kind.

I will examine the orphan designs and a few that were used more than once, but failed to catch on, in the next two posts.

Orphan designs were unique storage plans, made to meet unusual customer needs. Non-standard-sized elevators were built to mimic Tillotson’s more basic offerings. Annexes were custom built. If an elevator and annex were built together, certain features were unique.

Here are the orphans of the 1940s.

Peterson Plan:

Peterson, Iowa (1944) was “storage, mainly,” with no driveway, a “x spout to leg,” and 12 1/2-foot-diameter tanks. It had a conveyor belt and a wooden, hand-operated man-lift. Its capacity was only 37,550 bushels. This was one of the smallest elevators Tillotson ever built, though a few were even smaller.

Farnsworth Plan:

Farnsworth, Tex. (1945) was the largest elevator Tillotson built to date, with a 350,000 bushel capacity. It had 19 bins with six 20-foot-diameter tanks, and a tunnel with a conveyor belt. A semi-truck driveway was built with a machine room directly overhead. Projects of this size were uncommon.

Farnsworth, Tex. will require a site visit, because we don’t know if a Tillotson elevator still stands. Three large elevators exist in Farnsworth, but none is typical of Tillotson’s style–two have hexagonal bins (the design made a big media splash in 1949), and the other could be a Tillotson, but looks more like a Chalmers and Borton elevator.

Dalhart Plan:

Dalhart, Tex. (1947) was a bit of an oddball, having an attached driveway rather than a center driveway. It had no basement and no distributor floor, but sported the “standard cupola.” It had four 20-foot-diameter tanks and could hold 150,000 bushels of grain. A 98,000-bushel annex was built alongside it at nearly the same time, which could explain the oddities: direct cross-spouts from the elevator provided gravity flow to the annex pit.

A second elevator was built in Dalhart, Tex., in 1949, which also gave is name to a plan: this “Dalhart Plan” described a large elevator with 310,000-bushel capacity.

Eva Plan:

Eva, Okla. (1947) was a very small elevator with only a 13,500 bushel capacity. The description says “cupola in D.F. [draw-form] wall.” The driveway was attached. It had two 14-foot bins, a “rope drive” and motor room.

Moscow Plan:

Moscow, Kan. (1948) is featured in an earlier post on this blog. It was a smallish elevator of 100,000 bushel capacity, four 14 feet-diameter tanks, and a 13 x 17 foot driveway with six bins directly overhead. It incorporated a dust bin.

Minneapolis, Kan., mill building, elevator, and annex

Mill Building:

Minneapolis, Kan. (1948) is a site that fooled me on first examination. No manhole covers were evident on any structures except for the mill building. I didn’t expect an elevator with a rectilinear headhouse to be a Tillotson creation, so when we featured the mill building in our post (follow link), I added specifications which describe the elevator beside it! We will publish the mill building specifications in a later post.

Greenwood, Neb. ca. 1951 with attached Tillotson annex

Hordville Plan:

Hordville, Neb. (1949) was a 70,000 bushel capacity elevator with four twelve-foot-diameter tanks, a driveway, and eight bins directly above the driveway. Its rounded headhouse, by 1949, was already standard on Tillotson elevators.

Hordville’s outward appearance is a miniature version of Tillotson elevators of the same vintage–a style that continued into the early 1950s. Greenwood, Neb. (1951), which was built using the Churdan plan, circa 1949, is a larger-scaled example of the type.

Pierson Plan:

Pierson, Iowa (1949, storage) had a 80,200 bushel capacity, four 15 1/4 foot-diameter tanks, a dump pit, one way scale, a spout floor below the bin roof, and cross spouts. It was designated “storage,” a structure more like an annex than a self-contained elevator.

Clare Plan:

Clare, Iowa (1949) was built to hold 88,800 bushels of grain with four 15 1/4 foot-diameter tanks. It had a spout floor below the bin roof and an attached drive.

The artists of the Tillotson Construction Company–architects and engineers, those creative, ingenious men–were prolific producers during the 1940s when elevator technology bloomed. The flower of their achievements can be seen scattered across the prairies, either finding useful work, or passing into idleness, while curious onlookers snap their pictures and move on.

After the 1940s, almost all of the first Tillotson designs were dropped or modified as technology advanced. Only two designs (Churdan and Jackson) of the late 1940s carried into the 50s, and they were rapidly replaced after that, as will be seen in the next post.