By Ronald Ahrens
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.
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?
An explanation has to be out there.
I really enjoy these elevator photos and stories. From the photos provided we can ascertain these things. The concrete headhouse / cupola has been removed and a steel structure installed in its place. Both bucket elevators / “Legs” are in place, which can be seen on one of the night photos. I designed and constructed several upgrade projects to Tillotson elevators. Commonly the first issue was to increase leg capacity. There was ample space in the leg wells to accommodate a higher capacity leg. Doing this normally required removal of the pothole type distributor and replacing it with a double rotary distributor as is shown in the photos. In a few of my projects, the new distributor was larger in diameter than the headhouse width. I suspect since this elevator does not show any signs of an explosion, that the headhouse was selectively demolished, a steel structure was constructed in its place to support the new distributor and legs and the lower portion of the steel structure was enclosed to help keep rain out of the bins from the locations where spouts entered them and from the manholes.
Grain dust explosion damage circa 1980 required building a new head house, and by that time OSHA specs encouraged or mandated leg motors and drives not being enclosed to minimize risk of major damage from grain dust explosions.