And it once had a railroad running through it.

Now?

Only the wind and the grain elevator are left.

This comment by Wild, wild west is worthy of adding to the post:
________________________________________________________________

What you have there is “crib house” construction where the structure is composed of various 8 or 10 foot (+,-) square bins built by laying two-by lumber of various widths, wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, one atop each other in layers and nailed down to each other with a metric crap-ton of nails and some horizontal steel rods for reinforcement against the pressure of the grain exerted against the sidewalls of the bins. Lest they come unzipped. This cribbing starts at ground level and goes up nearly to where the roof starts. You can see some of those crib layers on the side where the missing sheathing indicates a warehouse or maybe a powerhouse used to be.

One of those bins will form a vertical shaft called a leg well located where the windows are stacked. That shaft houses a bucket elevator leg, often built on-site of wood construction, a ladder built from 2×4 rungs and a manual rope manlift that is kind of a platform with (or without) a safety gate guided by vertical rails. The operator steps onto the platform (shades of Steely Dan there) and releases a foot brake and then pulls himself up to the top floor or back down with the rope. No OSHA in those days, but there is a counterweight to make the pull easier. Unless the operator is a little guy and his co-workers have added weights, of course. You could wreck out the elevator leg and rope manlift and build stairs in the leg well and install a modern manlift for utility and safety’s sake, not to mention aging knees.

There will be a central hallway of sorts from the dump pit shed on the elevator leg side thru the structure to the other side where the rail siding used to be. The top floor and head house extension will have the elevator leg head drive and whatever distribution method they used (there were several possible) to channel grain from the elevator leg to the various bins, the truck loadout spout/chute you see on the dump pit shed side, and a railcar loadout spout that may or may not have fallen off or have been removed from the other side. In those days, they loaded boxcars, not hopper cars, and they were a PITA. You had to build a bulkhead in the boxcar door and direct grain flow to both ends of the railcar somehow. As with distribution up top, there were several methods, none user friendly. But I digress. Anyway, the top floor would provide a lot of usable floor space.

Now, consider all the broken windows and metal sheathing that’s missing will have caused massive wood rot and also that you’re dealing with a concrete foundation that’s likely 100 years old, and perhaps older, built without a hint of geotechnical engineering or anything resembling ACI specifications. So, might be better to set fire to the place now rather than later because when those sumbitches do catch fire, there ain’t enough water available to stop ’em. The bins act as chimneys, the metal sheathing keeps the fire in and the wood being dry means they burn really hot and fast. Then you could bulldoze the foundations and build a new structure from the get-go. Then you’d have something.

Never mind the civil and mechanical challenges.

Anyway, alteration of the existing structure to add more floors and expand the ground level “hallway” could be done and certainly would result in a unique and interesting project, but considering all the compartments, not a very easy one.

Or anyway, that’s what I took away from my so-called career (the word “career” is classically defined as a job that dragged on much too long) designing, building and modifying commercial/industrial grain elevator and processing facilities, which began 50 years ago, or near enough, working on those crib elevators when they were still in wide-spread use but being abandoned at a rapid rate. You’ll find some still in operation in the Dakotas and elsewhere, but they’re an endangered species. Thank God. They’re interesting landmarks but don’t look too closely or you’ll see all kinds of warts. The one in the pic is, for all practical purposes, extinct.