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Built mostly from styrene with metal sheeting and a cast foundation, the author’s scratchbuilt grain elevator stands ready for business. PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR


A towering trace of a prairie town:


Modeling the Hill City grain elevator: Pt. I


This two-part series shows how I scratchbuilt an HO scale model of a grain elevator located in Hill City, Idaho/Bob Van Arnem


O


n the Camas Prairie in south central Idaho, where the spaces between places are open and


wide, a vestige of Hill City stands watch in the fleeting, golden moments of early morning. Rising forlorn from the broad plain in which it is planted, the elevator beckons to tell its story. Silent now, except for intermittent creakiness when the wind blows or as the day warms, it was once a vital link in the chain connecting the farmers’ fields to consumer markets. The elevator called to me, so to speak, in the spring of 1987, when I first pho- tographed it. Later,


it lured me to


sketch, measure, and photograph its in- terior and exterior. Pulling the sketches from a file of potential scratchbuilding


48


projects a few years ago, I quickly real- ized that I knew absolutely nothing about how a grain elevator operated. Endeavoring to find out introduced me to research sources that, heretofore, I did not know existed, and to Camas Prairie residents familiar with the Prairie elevators owned by the Colorado Mill and Elevator Company in the third decade of the twentieth century. As reported in the January 17, 1924,


issue of the Camas County Courier, the grain harvest for 1923–the year the Hill City grain elevator opened–was the largest to date in Camas Prairie history. It was estimated that 500 box- cars, including 150 contributed by Hill City, would carry the bounty to market. Grain brought to the Hill City eleva-


tor was weighed, then dumped into a pit and elevated to the head house in Calumet cups attached to a continuous canvas belt contained within a leg, which ran vertically from the pit to the head (top) of the leg. There were two legs, one for storage and another for shipping. From the storage head, the grain fell into a distributor, controlled by a hand crank on the first floor, which directed it into pipes leading to storage bins; from the shipping head, the grain flowed into a pipe leading to a five-bushel capacity scale, which then discharged the grain into the shipping pipe. The model elevator complex includes the pit, storage bins, head house with grain handling equipment,


dump AUGUST 2012


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