Ralston-Purina Visit

Recently my wife and I made the forty-minute drive to Circleville to take some photos of the former Ralston-Purina plant. Of the industries and buildings I will be including on my model railroad, this is the only one that still (largely) exists from the timeframe I am modeling.

That visit got me thinking, and I broke out my collection of photos, articles and maps to see how things fit together. In this post, I’ll compare photos from today to “back in the day”, provide a little plant history that I’ve scraped together, and go over a bit of rail operations. I’ll also touch on how I intend to model the structure.

Then vs. Now

It’s remarkable how little has changed over the decades. Ben Shahn took the following photo in 1938, as part of his work with the FSA (Farm Security Administration). This is my go-to reference for this building due to its detail and timeframe.

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Mr. Shahn took many photos of the Circleville area, and his collection, housed in the Library of Congress, is one reason I chose my particular modeling year. The photos are great references for buildings of course, but also for period environmental details. This particular photo includes bicycle riders, a mix of brick and asphalt street paving, trucks, weedy side tracks, coal hoppers, train order semaphores, etc. Great stuff.

Comparing the previous photo to mine from 2020 shows little change, other than the missing warehouse (where the truck dock is in the 1938 photo), soybean oil tanks, and chimney, and some added sheathing.

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Similarly, the southeast side of the plant also show few changes. The first photo below is a postcard, circa 1940; the second is my photo from 2020. Both are both taken from roughly the same spot. The biggest changes are the addition of siding and the subtraction of the boiler’s chimney.

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A Brief History of the Mill

Part of the fun of building models of specific buildings or places is the research that goes along with it. The most helpful for this facility were old editions of the Circleville Herald (via Newspapers.com) and Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. The Pickaway County Historical and Genealogical Library has also been a huge help.

On the 1927 Sanborn fire insurance map, the property was referred to as “H.M. Crites & Co. Flour Mill & Elevator”, was “re-built” in 1918 and had a 100,000-bushel capacity. According to a 1933 Herald article, Mr. Crites acquired the property in 1918 and presumably was responsible for the rebuilding. It’s not clear how extensive the rebuilding was, but it appears that the concrete headhouse and brick/concrete office were added, possibly replacing an older wooden structure.

At some point, the mill was sold to the Dixie Mills Company, whose properties (this and several others) were sold at auction at the courthouse in January of 1925, apparently to Mr. Crites. I suspect that the Dixie Mills Company was controlled by Mr. Crites, and that he bought it from himself at that auction.

In any case, Mr. Crites was back in control of the mill by 1933. In that year, he sold the property to Ralston-Purina in a transaction involving eight (or ten, depending on the source) additional properties. In reporting on the transaction, The Herald stated that Mr. Crites had “vast agricultural holdings … throughout several central Ohio counties” and “Mr. Crites pointed out [the S. Court st plant] is valued at $350,000” and all nine (or eleven) had a value just under a half-million dollars. Quite a sum in 1933. The deal was described as “one of the biggest in Pickaway-co’s history“.

Ralston-Purina immediately began refitting the property, converting it from a flour mill to a feed mill. They installed two French soybean oil expellers in January, 1935, and four more the following summer. These gave the plant the capacity to process up to one million bushels of beans per year.

In 1936, new slip-form concrete “tanks” were constructed, with a capacity of 200,000 bushels. This first set are along the tracks, directly west of the head house. In 1939, an additional twelve tanks were added to the immediate southwest of the first set. These added another 250,000 bushels.

Also in 1939, the company removed an old brick building that sat along Court Street (on the north side of the brick office building) and built a new metal-clad, two-story warehouse to store feed produced in the plant. To the rear (west) of this new building, a three-story metal-clad building to house equipment for manufacturing livestock and poultry feed was added. Some of these improvements are visible in the Ben Shahn photo.

And that brings us up to date for my modeling period!

Railroad Service

In 1938, the plant was served directly by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Zanesville branch, which ran from Zanesville to Morrow. The branch was often referred to as the C&MV (Cincinnati and Muskingum Valley) after the company that built the line in the 1850s. The plant was also served indirectly by the N&W (Norfolk and Western), via an interchange/transfer track from Huston St.

Purina was a money-maker for the Pennsylvania railroad. It, along with the Eshelman Feed Mill a quarter mile to the east, made Circleville the heaviest shipping point along the entire branch. In later years, the branch was stubbed at the Scioto River when the bridge over the river was determined to be unsafe for the traffic of the day.

From an operations perspective, I’ve found evidence of a surprisingly wide variety of car-types being delivered to the plant.

• Boxcars for delivering soybeans and other ingredients used in feed products
• Boxcars for shipping the final product
• Hopper cars to deliver coal for plant power and steam heat
• Tank cars to deliver petroleum products for the neighboring filling station/garage.

The area around the Ralston-Purina plant was cramped, from a railroad switching perspective. The mill, a busy US Highway crossing (S. Court Street/U.S. 23), two interlocked Norfolk and Western crossings, and the N&W interchange track were right on top of one another at the east end. The upside was that all of the switching could be done from the west end, which had only one side street crossing (Harrison Street – just out of view in the map above).

It appears that none of the tracks in the Purina area were double-ended, so the crews couldn’t do a traditional run-around move to get the locomotive onto the east end of a train after switching was complete. However, railroaders from the 1980’s have told me that they got around this problem by using a “gravity drop” with the aid of a light descending grade toward the Scioto River. The crew would move the locomotive out of the way, then release the brakes on the cars they wanted to remove. The cars would drift west past the locomotive, which could then couple to the east end of the cars. It seems reasonable to assume that the same moves would have been done in 1938-9.

Modeling

I’d always planned on representing the plant on the model railroad, given its visual and economic prominence in this part of Circleville. Initially, it’s inclusion was only going to be cosmetic, but after learning all that I’ve typed above (and finding I had more space on the model railroad than I thought), I am now motivated to include Purina as an active switching point. Those operating plans, however, are in the future.

The plans for modeling the building itself consist of a pretty straight forward kitbash. The base for the model will be Walther’s ADM Grain Elevator kit, which represents a slip-form concrete storage facility. This model has the same relatively compact profile as Purina.

Although a good starting point, the kit is too short vertically and horizontally. The prototype structure is relatively compact in the grand scheme of things (great for a model railroad!), but it’s much bigger than a railroad car – refer again to the Ben Shahn photo. My modeling philosophy is to preserve these proportions where possible.

To get there, Christy and I will bash two of the kits together to give it more visual “heft”. The changes will involve the following:

• Raise the kit’s head house “shoulders” from 76 to 90 scale feet and it’s “head” to 100 feet
• Raise the height of the kit’s storage bins from 63 to about 80 scale feet
• Add four more storage bins (twelve vs. the model’s eight) to increase the horizontal footprint

That build will be the subject of some future post.

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