February 5, 2004

Owners razing old grain elevator

By finding a solution for Grinnell Mill last month, Yellow Springs may have saved one of its historic landmarks, but another one is about to come down.

The old Linkhart’s grain elevator on Dayton Street is being torn down after a dwindling five years of business on the property forced its owner, Jerry Fess, to call it quits.

Weather permitting, the building will be gone by the end of the month, and the village will have lost what is possibly the oldest standing structure left in town.

The great-grandson of former Antioch College president and former U.S. Senator Simeon D. Fess, Jerry Fess purchased the elevator along with the brick Pemberton House beside it in 1996 with great hopes of turning the elevator into a community “place for sharing,” he said in an interview in the News at the time.

“I had delusions of grandeur,” Fess said last week. “I wanted to redo the mill, but unfortunately I bought a pig in a poke.”

For five years Fess, his wife, Rose, and his daughter, Julie, operated Garden Decor, selling garden equipment from the building’s front lawn and intending to reinvest the profits into restoring the elevator. But sales plummeted during the Village’s 2001 streetscape project on Dayton Street, and the business was not able to recover, Fess said.

Last year Garden Decor closed, the Fesses sold their home and moved to Xenia and the elevator sank further into the ground.

Fess estimated that over the seven years he owned the elevator, he invested over $250,000 in the building, including the purchase price. When he heard that the estimated cost of a simple restoration would be an additional $120,000, he decided to sell the property.

“I couldn’t afford to do it, it’s way beyond my means,” Fess said. “A lot of people tell me a lot of different things about its worth, but to me that is still a beautiful, valuable piece of property.”

But the building and its property have been on the market for a year and a half with no serious offers, he said.

So last year he hired Hardwoods of YesterYear to take the building down and recycle the timber for resale.

High demand for the company’s recycling business has dictated the very slow pace of the tear-down process, which didn’t begin until last week. Hardwoods estimated that 40 percent of the building is salvageable for reuse, Fess said, and for those interested in local relics, the grain elevator offers some materials that are over 150 years old.

The front part of the elevator was built around 1843 as a general store called Stewart & Bros. in the commercial district along the railroad, according to local historian Don Hutslar, who grew up on a farm outside Yellow Springs in the 1930’s.

By 1846, the building was a freight and possibly a passenger depot that handled the building materials for Antioch College, said Scott Sanders, the Antioch University archivist. It wasn’t remodeled as a grain elevator until the 1870s, Hutslar said.

By the 1920s a man named Brice Linkhart owned and operated the grain elevator with his wife, Nettie, who worked in the office. Hutslar later hauled corn and wheat from his farm to the elevator to be weighed, graded and stored for shipment. He recalled driving his truck onto the 24-foot beam scales on the south side of the building to be weighed first with the load and then without the load, the difference being the weight of the grain.

Many farmers in the area stored their grain at Linkhart’s, where they met other residents to talk business, gossip and share information, Hutslar said. However, it could have been hard to hear the exchange over the noise of the separators, shakers and steel roller mills that students such as local resident Bob Baldwin could hear from Bryan High School next door.

When Baldwin bought the building in 1975, the elevator was no longer functioning, but he got a lot of land at a good price, he said. He rented out the front part to several businesses, such as Stutzman’s Garden Center in the 1980s, but had long periods of vacancy in between tenants.

When the Fesses bought the building they were not able to restore any of the interior. An open sewer had caused much of the wood to rot and collapse, Fess said, causing him to fall through the floor early on in the remodeling process. The inside was closed up after that and never used again, he said.

Once the elevator is razed, Fess plans to install a storm sewer on the property and then try to sell or lease the lot, which is approximately 340 feet by 100 feet and includes an old shed toward the western edge.

“I’d like to see something there that complements the rest of the village,” Fess said. “I don’t want to see a McDonald’s or a gas station there.”

—Lauren Heaton