Group touts grain elevators

LINCOLN - It’s not just one-room schools and country churches that are disappearing from Nebraska’s landscape.

A statewide preservation group on Thursday added grain elevators the old wooden and sheet-metal structures that once towered over every town to the endangered list.

In releasing its annual list of the state’s “fading places” and “hidden treasures,” an official of Heritage Nebraska said grain elevators built between the 1880s and the 1920s are disappearing at “an alarming rate” across the state.

J.L. Schmidt, the group’s executive director, said these “cathedrals of the prairie” deserve consideration for renovation and reuse, just like the dozens of country schools that have closed because of declining population.

“It’s a piece of rural Nebraska that I think is taken too much for granted,” Schmidt said of the old elevators.

Communities, he said, ought to consider the historic value of the structures before they are used in fire-training exercises for the local fire department.

Schmidt cited the F.H. Schafer Elevator in Scottsbluff, which is over 100 years old, as an example of a grand old elevator still in use. A historic mill in the Florence neighborhood in Omaha was converted for reuse as an art gallery, and an old elevator in Ralston became a commercial mall. An 1890 elevator in Ithaca, Neb., is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The group names “fading places” and “hidden treasures” as a way to highlight structures in need of preservation and to bring attention to less-publicized historic buildings.

Besides vacant schools and old grain elevators, the group’s list of fading places included the threatened Industrial Arts Building on the old state fairgrounds in Lincoln and the eight sculptures erected at Nebraska’s Interstate 80 rest stops in 1976.

The Industrial Arts Building is slated for demolition if a reuse plan isn’t submitted by July 1. One of the I-80 sculptures has been put in storage because it needs repairs.

Thursday’s announcement was made in Scribner, Neb., to highlight the naming of the community’s historic downtown area to the “hidden treasures” list.

Others spots on the hidden treasures list: Bassett Lodge and Range Cafe in Bassett; Bess Streeter Aldrich House and Museum, Elmwood; downtown Sidney; Flag Creek Bridge near Orleans; Mars Historical Area near Royal; Meadow Grove Federal Credit Union; Oak Ballroom, Schuyler; Old Great Western Sugar Factory dormitory, Mitchell; “My Antonia” Pavelka farmstead near Bladen; Pavilion Hotel, Taylor; Thorpe Opera House, David City; Larsen Tractor Test and Power Museum, Lincoln.

The fading places list: Bethany Presbyterian Church, Carroll, and churches similarly situated statewide; Burton Bank Building, Orleans; Carnegie Library Building, Schuyler; Lodgepole Opera House; Old Stone House in Harlan County.

Contact the writer:

402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com