Berea, NE was founded in 1889 when the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy rail line came through. A wood crib elevator was built along the tracks in 1922.
Photo by Bruce Selyem.
On Aug. 1, 1922, two brothers, F. A. and E. C. Barker, opened the new wood crib elevator they had built in Berea, NE. The town was founded in 1889 when the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad arrived, and by the time the Barker elevator opened for business, Berea had stores, a post office, school, church, and the Berea Garage, where automobiles and farm machinery could be repaired. E. C. was an attorney and real estate man in Alliance. F. A. ran the elevator. Their ownership would last only two years.
The Alliance Times-Herald newspaper reported on Oct. 7, 1924, that Stephen and George Deaver had bought the Barker elevator. Stephen Deaver was already an experienced grain man, and F. A. Barker would stay on for a while during the transition. The Deaver family would expand and continue to operate the Beaver elevator as Deaver Grain Company until 1992.
It is unclear when the two wood-frame annexes were added, one on the north side of the crib elevator and one on the south side – an educated guess would be the early 1940s. The smooth-walled steel bins were added in the mid-1950s. Around 1900, the oil industry developed this type of tank for storing oil because the tank could be dismantled and moved when an oil well went dry. It wasn’t introduced to the grain industry until the 1950s and was popular only until about 1980, when corrugated steel bin manufacturers began to make larger, thinner gauge, cheaper bins.
A 1958 aerial photo of the Berea facility shows five steel bins extending along the tracks from the south side of the larger frame annex and three steel bins extending to the north side of the small frame annex. In addition, the photo shows the new Deaver steel facility to the north, with the tall Deaver head house in the center of two bins. Eventually there would be two more bins added to the north side of the 1950s elevator.
A Delsing Family Affair
Stephen Deaver ran the Berea elevator for 35 years until his unexpected death in January 1959. His son, Wayne, was involved at the elevator for a while. The Deavers hired Bill Delsing in 1960. According to Bill’s son, Brad, running the Berea was a Delsing family affair.
“There were six of us,” Brad recalls, “and we all worked there at least during the summers. I was 12 years old when I worked in the older south elevator in 1972, and my older brother, Mike, was 14 and worked in the north elevator.” When asked about the elevator, Brad shares a story he heard from old-timers that a horse pulling a slip was used to dig the tunnels and the pit. He remembers the single wood leg and the manual lift. He recounts his father riding down on the manlift too fast. “Dad slowed himself by holding on to the rope, and by the time he got off the lift, his gloves were smoking.”
When the Deaver family sold the elevator in 1992 to Kelley Bean Company, with headquarters in Scottsbluff, NE, Bill Delsing stayed on as the manager. The Delsings installed 4-foot-long bean slides in the bins to slow the beans and keep them from breaking.
After Bill Delsing retired in 2002, Kelley Bean continued to operate the elevator for four more years. Afterward, the company leased it out. The tax records show FGW Enterprises (Feitz, Guettermann & Wells, a partnership) from 2006 to 2008. When the partnership dissolved, Bryce Wells kept the Berea facility under his company, West Plains Company. In 2012, Kelley Bean sold the Berea operation to West Plains LLC, a different company headquartered in Texas.
According to Colin Gavin, West Plains LLC’s wheat product manager of operations, “We never used the wood elevator and annexes, only the steel bin facility to store corn, wheat, and yellow peas. We never loaded to rail. The last time we unloaded grain at Berea was in 2017.” West Plains LLC sold a number of its older facilities, including Berea, to Legacy Cooperative in 2024.
It has now been at least 13 years since the 1924 wood elevator was used. The entire operation has been silent since 2017. Bart Moseman, vice president of grain with Legacy Cooperative in Hemingford, NE, says Legacy isn’t using the Berea elevator at the moment.
“It is old and worn out,” says Moseman, “and water collecting in both the north and south elevators is an ongoing problem.” No decision has been made about the future of the old wood elevator, now more than 100 years old, nor the rest of the Berea facility.
Barb and Bruce Selyem are directors of the Country Grain Elevator Historical Society. Contact the society at 406-581-1076; email: bselyem@cgehs.org.