RED LODGE - For years, Kathy Haughey Loo had seen the grain elevator on the west side of Broadway as she had driven through Red Lodge but she had never thought much about it. The tall structure seemed as much a part of the landscape as the Beartooth Mountains looming south of town.
Then early last year, she heard about efforts to prevent the elevator from being torn down. Local residents had called elevator preservationists Bruce and Barbara Selyem, who talked the owner into delaying its removal for six months so it might be saved.
She bought the elevator and hired local contractor Jeff DeVries to clean it, gut it out and rebuild the inside...
...Shut down in the mid-1990s after operating as an elevator for nearly 100 years, the structure had been home to birds flocking in through broken windows...
...An elevator at the current elevator's site was built in 1909, according an article by Barbara Selyem on the Grainnet Web site. A fire in 1919 damaged or destroyed the building, leaving charred sections of walls that remain part of the building today.
The 67-foot tall building was constructed by stacking 2-by-6 boards on top of each other. Every 6 inches, 20-penny nails were hammered in to keep the boards in place. The sturdy 30-by-30-foot-square structure was built with about 350,000 board feet of vertical-grain fir - a higher-quality lumber - and "kegs and kegs" of nails, DeVries said. Within that main structure were 15 compartments or bins.
A building of less-substantial construction that surrounded the base of the elevator was torn down and rebuilt in an agricultural style that ties it to the main building. Most of the siding on the lower structure is painted barn red. A smaller tower on the south side was saved and also incorporated in the overall project.
The outside of the elevator has been recovered in corrugated steel, a traditional siding for elevators, DeVries said. Corrugated steel also will be used as wainscoting in the bathrooms.
Although the buildings are being rebuilt or extensively renovated, Loo wants as much of the feel of the original structure left as possible. "We're trying to keep the character of what it was," Loo said.
Wide stretches of the original walls will be left exposed, showing the aged, reddish-amber 2-by-6s stacked on top of each other. Grain chutes still punctuate the walls in several places.
Loo hopes to plant some of the grain found in the elevator outside as part of the landscaping.
A small alcove inside the building will house a mini-museum of some of the elevator equipment and an explanation of how the elevator worked. Because of the difficulty of transforming the tall, narrow upper levels of the tower into usable space, only the ground floor will be used for offices. Loo hopes to have the building ready for occupants sometime this spring.
Loo declined to say how much she paid for the property and how much she's putting into it, but she did say that the purchase price and renovation costs will be reasonable enough that she expects the property to be profitable eventually. That is important because it may encourage others to tackle similar projects elsewhere.
From the Billings Gazette