When you typically think of Oklahoma skyscrapers, buildings such as Devon Tower in Oklahoma City or the BOK headquarters in Tulsa may be front of mind. But there’s another kind of skyscraper that rises up along the horizon line of hundreds of smaller towns across Oklahoma. The grain elevators of America’s breadbasket have served as an important connecting point for the transportation of grain from the fields to the rest of the world.
A lot of these reinforced concrete behemoths were built across the plains from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, by Reginald Tillotson, whose work is being remembered by his grandson, Ronald Ahrens, through his blog posts at OurGrandfathersGrainElevators.com.
KOSU visited recently with Ahrens about his blog and a recent road trip through western Oklahoma, which is the home of his grandfather’s very first grain elevator project. Listen below.