This tiny Atlanta, unlike its much larger namesake in Georgia, has no Olympic aspirations, no grand visions of international acclaim, no billion-dollar babies in the birthing.
That is not to say that a village doesn`t dream just as a city dreams, but on its own, humbler scale.
When Deane May and Dennis Smith look at their skyline, which generally hovers a few stories from the horizon, they see one towering object of great wonder.
To them, it is ”amazing.”
To them, it is ”beautiful.”
To them, it could be a tourist magnet, a centerpiece for development.
To most people, it`s just another old grain elevator.
”Quite a few people considered us crazier than pet `coons when we started this, and some probably still do,” said Smith, a banker and village dreamer.
”But I think it has real value because it is from where we have been. More and more, people are interested in their roots.”
In Atlanta of central Illinois, population 1,800 and frozen, the humble dream of May and Smith is just this: to save an old grain elevator in their old grain town and, thereby, maybe save some of the town itself.
Towards that goal, they have rescued from demolition their town`s most prominent reminder of a prosperous past and, in December, plan to file a formal application to have it become the first grain elevator listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places.
But that is only the initial step in their big small-town plan, which, on a per capita basis, might be said to rival that of Atlanta, Ga., the great municipal overachiever that went for broke and landed the gold: the 1996 Olympic Games.
Little Atlanta has already impressed a few folks.
”They do get enthusiastic about this, and to me what is important is the attention being given to this type of building by a community,” said Ann Swallow of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency in Springfield.
”Normally these buildings are used for firefighting practice; instead, this one seems to be inspiring a real community effort, with people donating work and services and materials,” she said.
”If this sparks a whole bunch of applications for local grain elevators around the state, I say `great.` I hope it does just that.”
Swallow, whose recommendation is considered in the acceptance process, said the Downstate grain elevator appears to be a good candidate for the national register.
A Midwest hub
”On a smaller scale, I am pretty confident this will develop for us in our Atlanta in the same way the Olympics will for the other Atlanta,” said May, who noted that the workings of the old grain elevator ”blow my mind.”
The unenlightened might consider the structure no more remarkable than an old full-service gas station, or a single-screen movie theater.
Surrounded by cottonwoods and soft maples of surpassing height and years, the 55-foot-high woodframe elevator stands weatherbeaten but distinguished in its dominanting profile at the center of Atlanta, hard beside railroad tracks running east-west, north-south.
The elevator was built in 1902, when the village was a thriving rail-shipping center for locally produced grain. Atlanta was named around 1855 by an early pioneer fond of the South`s premiere city (but only after it was discovered that the names ”Xenia” and ”Hamilton” had already been claimed in the state).
Because of its access to rail transportation and its location in the heart of the Corn Belt, the town was once the busiest grain-shipping town on the railroad between Chicago and St. Louis, according to local histories.
Home-style construction
The elevator, originally built for grain merchant John H. Hawes, was state of the art in its day. It required no electricity and only a single-cylinder gas engine to power an intricate system of ropes and pulleys driven by a line shaft.
When completed, it had a storage capacity of 30,000 bushels and replaced a primitive system of dumping grain onto high ground so it could be poured into rail cars below.
Unlike most granaries of its era, it was built like a home, with a brick foundation, wood-beam supports and bevelled weatherboard siding. It was originally roofed in slate to protect it from sparks spewed by passing locomotives.
Some rural romantics have referred to grain elevators as ”country skyscrapers.” Even the urbane Chicago architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, father of the modern skyscraper, might have found in a granary`s economical and functional design a little Bauhaus on the prairie.
But while Mies` glass-and-steel city towers have been criticized as cold and aloof from their surroundings, small-town grain elevators are literally and figuratively filled with the lives of those who live within their view.
That fact was recognized by May, serving his final term as Logan County Board chairman and running for county treasurer, and Smith, a hometown boy who stayed around to keep Atlanta alive.
Bypassing Route 66
Though the Hawes elevator was in continuous operation until 1975, the town`s growth has been stunted since the turn of the century.
While towns to the north and south flourished, little Atlanta languished and took one slighting blow after the other.
The railroads abandoned their tracks. Route 66 through town was abandoned for Interstate Highway 55 farther out. Businesses closed. Hotels emptied.
”Except for a stoplight, we still have the same things most small towns have, but we need to do something to get the town going again,” Smith said.
Two of Atlanta`s most distinguished old structures, a blacksmith shop and the high school, had already been allowed to crumble when the city bought the deteriorating Hawes grain elevator for $2,000 at a tax sale and announced plans to tear it down as a potential hazard last year.
But May and Smith and a few sympathizers had seen enough of Atlanta lost. At 41, Smith had come to the point where he realized, ”You have to know where you have been before you can figure out where you are going.”
May`s motives in this case are not those of a self-serving politician, he assured. He is a lover and devotee of the arts: the industrial arts.
Upon retiring from farming, May enrolled in a community college to study machines. He now restores antique farm machinery and motors just for the beauty of it, he said.
He finds wonder in antique hardware that, with a little cleaning up, still does its job. He hears music in the squeakless sound of an old pulley or an ancient gas engine put back in working order.
Most politicians let drop that they`ve built bridges or funded new schools. May finds a way to mention that, ”I`ve got a 1935 Allis Chalmers tractor in storage, and a 25-horsepower Fairbanks Morris diesel engine built May 10, 1910.”
Built to last
To save the old grain elevator and get it working again, Smith and May first reserved a room at the Atlanta National Bank one night last winter and announced the formation of their Atlanta Historic Preservation Council.
”We figured probably just Deane and I would show up, but we pulled up and there were cars everywhere. We had a whole room full of people, probably 30 or more.”
Impressed with the turnout, the city fathers granted the old grain elevator a stay of execution.
The preservationists then went to work. They found a relative of a local man who was an engineer in Peoria. He drove over and gave the building`s structure an inspection.
They don`t build them like this anymore, was his appraisal.
”It doesn`t sway anything like the Sears Tower,” noted Smith while in the elevator`s upper reaches one recent wind-whipped day.
”The guy who built this built our old high school, too, and they had a heck of a time getting it torn down,” said May. ”I`ve been told by people who knew him that he was hellbent for strong.”
Encouraged that the building`s weak points were primarily cosmetic and mechanical, they obtained a $500 grant for repairs from the Logan County Tourism Bureau and raised $1,050 more by raffling off a steam engine at a harvest festival.
They expect an additional $40,000 or so will be needed to make the elevator fully operational. In the meantime their enthusiasm has been accumulating interest across the county and beyond.
”A man from Litchfield called and said he heard we needed some roof work on our old grain elevator. He said he had a roofing company and an interest in old-time things,” May related.
”I told him that we would love to have him come, but we didn`t have any money to pay him. He said he didn`t want any money.”
”He sent the men and they patched the roof so the rain doesn`t get in anymore.”
Step right up
To prepare their case for the National Register of Historic Places, Smith and May have become scholars in the esoteric field of grain elevator history. In their research, which included book work and interviews with longtime residents, they confirmed their suspicions that theirs was a unique granary.
It served farmers driving high-wheeled, horse-drawn grain wagons. The wagons were driven into the elevator and positioned so their wheels were on so-called dump logs that could be mechanically teeter-tottered to lower the back end of the wagon while raising the top and dumping the grain.
The elevator is also unique in that it has a seven-flight staircase leading from the first floor to the top, or head house, instead of the customary ladder or manually operated one-man lift, he said.
That stairway is a source of no little conversation in Atlanta. Ray Thompson, 96, who is in his 67th year of operating his own Atlanta granary, told Smith that he ”had never heard of, let alone seen, an elevator with a stairwell to the head house,” he recounted.
The stairway could prove to be a great feature if Smith and May achieve their dream of one day operating the old elevator as the centerpiece tourist attraction of an agricultural museum and tourist center, they said.
”We don`t want to get too presumptuous about that, but we have thought maybe we could have a museum on the grounds, too,” said Smith.
Added May excitedly: ”Have you ever been to Minden, Neb.? Well, 37 years ago a man started something like this there, in a town of only 3,000 people located 12 miles off the interstate, and now they draw 100,000 visitors a year and charge people $4 to get in” at the Harold Warp Pioneer Village, May said. ”I`m sure the City Council would like to see something like that in Atlanta.
Let skeptics note that nobody ever said small towns should make no big plans.
