The Grain Elevator

After the war my Dad came home to Seaton and after a short-lived teaching stint began working at his father's grain elevator.  Sometime after he would purchase it from his dad and  would remain in the family for the next 30 years.  As soon as the livestock population dropped, the railroad went out, and Herb was nearing retirement he decided to sell and found a buyer in Andy Anderson from Aledo.  It was a fortuitous sale, as business was never the same for the Seaton Grain Company.  It wasn't too many years later that Anderson closed shop and the old place was shuttered.  Dick Carson bought it but I have no idea what he used it for.  Perhaps a place to store his farm gran, I don't know.  I do know it has slowly fallen to ruin and in any other city it would have been condemned and brought down.  

This is from the south looking north.  The white-roofed small building to the left was the office.  When I was a kid it had the requisite scales and front counter you see in all elevator offices.  It also had a hard-vinyl overstuffed chair with batting coming out of the arms.  There was a small back room with a large roll-top desk.  There were two pop machines I remember, one a flat water cooled machine that you had to slide bottles through the aisles after you put in your nickel or dime, whatever it was.  Then there was an upright 7-Up machine that had a cool metal handle you pushed down to get your pop.  

The picture above also shows the small brick building on the right along the main drag.  That was where the Mole Man would squat all day and watch the cars go by.  I have no idea what type of commerce ever happened here, but it must have provided him with some kind of living.   There was a one-man rope lift inside the elevator that would take you to the top of the building.  Mark tells me that you could walk around and see the various bins filled with grain.  Sadly, I never made it up, but I don't know why.  Cowardice?  Hope not.  Doesn't seem possible since I climbed to the top of the water tower in town.  Another example of lives axiom: "It's not the things you do that torments you, but the things you don't do."  Wish I'd done it.  But I didn't.     

Traveling back home in December and having been invited to attend church with Mark and Holly, I had time to explore before services.  This was the area where trucks would dump their load.  It had a neat steel grated area where trucks would stop and begin raising their beds, and the elevator people would raise the rear gate.  The grain would then be augured to its respective bin.  The room to the left was the mixing room.  This was where you would mix the various feeds that would be put in the augur truck to be taken to farms in the area.  And of course, it all smelled great.  Fresh churned corn and grain, it's a smell I'll always remember.   

The main area, and to the right was where the train boxcars would be filled with grain to go to market.  The wiring and junction boxes that were there when we were kids or young adults.  The wood is weathered and rotting, and the place is on its last legs.

The basement area that looks like its been in a tornado.  I can't remember too much about the basement area but the steps going down were in the mixing room in the back.

My mother was always saddened by empty, abandoned houses.  She could always see the happy times in every house, the newborns, the Christmas's, birthday parties, the family reunions.  Walking around the place now is sad, as I can remember the fun times.  The time Mark and I took a load of feed out to a farmer but forgot to swing the augur arm back in its cradle.  The fun farmers that would populate the office, people like Jim Bowen ("Just wanna give you some login''), and Lehman McClelland (Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllll  Jeeeeeeeeeeessssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuus Chhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssssssstttttttttttttttttttttttttt.)"  and then put out his cigarette without shoes or socks, just to name a couple.  The elevator employees like Dorothy Smith, Louis Owens, and Chuck Welch.  The mad chicken that chased people around.  The pop bottle rockets being shot down to those we thought could take the joke.  VG getting all pissed about the "Goddamn Democrats" pounding the arms of the overstuffed chair and the batting would go flying.  The contest to name a new Kent feed and Herb called it "Blythe Spirit".  The Kent feeds clock mentioned a couple days ago and the Nov 6 calendar page stapled to the window frame (the twins' birthday.   I forget their names but there were two brothers who brought new bagged feed to the storage shed from Kent Feeds located in Muscatine.  They were pretty nice guys and I'm sure they're gone now.  

Old feed shed.  It no longer exists, and certainly didn't look this bad back when the Blythes owned it.  The door clear down at the end was left open when we camped out and we put the keys right there.  We slept on the feed bags clear down to the left.  Old Harry Bird came walking by and took those keys.   

Oh yeah, the time some of us camped out in the feed shed and Harry Bird came walking by and took the elevator keys laying by the door thinking somebody hadn't shut the place up.  When we woke we were horrified that we had lost the keys.  Damn Harry, mind your won business.  harry is the guy who did wood working in retirement and made a wooden cardinal with name plaque for his house.  On one side, was 'The Birds', but on the other side was 'The Bird' due to his running out of room for the "s".