J. H. Hawes Elevator

In the late 1970s the brick engine house and the small white building that served as the office and scale house were demolished. Those two buildings have since been replaced by those seen in these photos, the engine house was rebuilt and the office was replaced with a donated building.

Later the elevator building was almost demolished after the town acquired it in the late 1980s but civic and history minded folks stepped up to save it. After rehabilitation it opened to the public as a museum with limited hours in June, July and August.

When the elevator was built grain would arrive from a farm by wagon and would be pulled up the ramp into the building. Once in the building the wagon would be tilted on a sort of teeter-totter like mechanism to empty the grain into a pit below it. The wagon would then exit on the other side of the building. The ramp seen in this photo is the exit ramp.

A vertical conveyor belt with small wooden buckets would haul the grain from the pit to the top of the tower where it would be dumped into one of six chambers and from there into box cars like the one in this photo. Several boxcars waiting to be filled might be lined up on the siding next to the building. The only remnants of the siding left are the tracks this boxcar sits on. In later years, after rail service ended, trucks would be filled with grain where the boxcar stands now.

The elevator was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

Photo(s): 2015