By Melissa Wagoner
It was forbidden love – not farming – that was on Whitney Davis’s mind the first time she noticed the old wooden grain elevator outside Pratum.
“I had met my high school sweetheart, Cody Glennie, my sophomore year,” Davis – who graduated from Silverton High School in 2010 – said. “He grew up in Pratum, just a stone’s throw away from the grain elevator.”
Warned they needed to stay away from each other before they “got into trouble,” Davis nevertheless pined for Glennie each time she scanned the horizon.
Photo Courtesy Ulrich Burkhalter
“Every time I would drive those country roads I could see the grain elevator high above all the farmers’ fields and always think of my ‘secret’ boyfriend and feel those good old butterflies,” Davis recalled.
It’s a feeling Davis has never forgotten, even as her relationship with Glennie has progressed beyond the ‘secret’ realm.
“Years later we are still together and still very much in love,” she confirmed.
Which is why, in September 2022 Davis – now an artist – set out to paint a mural that would commemorate their relationship.
“The mural is out of the real public eye, it’s actually on the side of our barn,” she said of the painting, which features a bald eagle clutching a sheaf of wheat with the grain elevator emblazoned across its chest. “It simply was just for our own enjoyment.”
But when she discovered, only a few days after finishing the project, that the grain elevator had been torn down, she decided to share photos of the mural with the community that was now grieving its removal.
“Glad I get to keep a little piece of its history here in Pratum,” Davis wrote on the post, which was shortly joined by others bemoaning the loss of a building that had become an iconic part of Pratum’s skyline.
“It was a nice location to practice my rising moon shots,” hobbyist photographer Ulrich Burkhalter said when asked about the hundreds of photographs of the grain elevator he has taken over the years.
In fact, Burkhalter has taken so many, that the Pratum Co-op began using them in their own publications, which is how Burkhalter himself learned that the building was to be torn down.
“I kind of got to know the workers there,” he said. “At one occasion I asked if I could see the interior of the elevator and its long time operator gave me a tour of it.”
Attending the demolition on Sept. 7, 2022 with his wife, Heidi, Burkhalter took the last set of pictures of the grain elevator, first as it was dismantled, then of the open sky. Later, Heidi posted the photos on Facebook with the caption, “Bittersweet moment.”
Which is why Davis is so glad to have her mural.
“I’m very grateful that timing somehow worked out…” she said. “I didn’t go a single day without seeing the elevator and thinking of my honey.”
