540 County Rd History - Louisville Grain Elevator

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From One Old Timer To Another We Offer Greetings TO THE METHOD SF CHURCH We invite you to come in and see us. We now have in stock some Al 3rd cutting hay. Bring your grinding to the THE LOUISVILLE ELEVAOTR z, From Louisville Times, Sept. 3, 1942, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Methodist Church, Louisville Historical Museum Howard Moore and Don Moore are remembered as having given jobs at the Elevator to Louisville's young men. For example, Lee Evans, who was born in 1917, worked at the Louisville Grain Elevator in the mid 1930s. In his autobiography, entitled From Happy Valley to the Mountaintop, he wrote: "As I grew older, I worked regularly after school and on Saturdays at the elevator, shoveling grain into the chute after it was delivered. I sacked grain and loaded it into cars and trucks for customers or for delivery on the elevator -owned truck into Denver. At my highest rate of pay, I got 50 cents a day! But I grew strong with the heavy work, and by the time I was seventeen I could grab the ear of a sack and lift a one hundred pound sack of grain with each hand and pitch it from the walkway up into a truck about four feet higher" (p. 71). Thomas Family Association and Ownership By the time of the 1946 Louisville directory, Charles Thomas had become the manager of the Grain Elevator. Charles Thomas' wife (lona Bowes Thomas) and Donald Moore's wife (Sadie Bowes Moore) were sisters, perhaps leading to Charlie Thomas taking over the management of the Elevator not long after the tenure as manager by Donald Moore and his father. A newspaper account states that Thomas lost one hand while working with a corn conveyor at the Elevator. By 1949, the manager had become Vance Lynn, possibly as a result of Thomas' injury. According to the 1951, 1953, and 1955 directories for Louisville, the manager was Dan Gunkel. In 1957, Charles Thomas (1912-2002) and his brother, Quentin Thomas (1908-1986), who had a feed store nearby on Pine Street, purchased the Grain Elevator from the Colorado Milling & Elevator Company. The deed states that it was purchased for "$10 and other valuable consideration." This was the first time that the building became a locally owned business, after fifty years of outside ownership. The Thomas family was a pioneer family of Louisville with varied business interests and properties. Charles Thomas and Quentin Thomas were the grandsons of Nicholas and Mary Thomas. Nicholas Thomas was from Wales and worked as a coal miner, while Mary Oldacre Thomas 's personal history includes the fact that she had worked as a chain maker as a young woman in England before marrying and coming to the United States. They immigrated from England in 1881 with their young son, Nicholas 12