Small as a community did not exist. However, the Alfalfa Mill was owned by W. J. Small who had a number of these plants around Kansas and Nebraska. The railroad adopted Small as the location name.

James Burke drawing

In the early days, the mill consisted of a warehouse, office trailer, and a dehydration cylinder. In the late 50s a pelletizing process was installed which included some rather all storage silos. The plant operated 24 hours a day. The field cutters blew the green alfalfa into trucks which were lifted bodily by the hoist at the plant and dumped into the fired rotating cylinder. The dehydrated meal at the other end of the cylinder was manually sacked and stacked in the warehouse or in boxcars on the spur or trucks at the dock.

An alfalafa dehydrator which was installed at Elmdale, KS, in 1945 is pictured from the Kansas State Library.

James Burke reports, "A significant business on the branch in the 40s and 50s was the produce of two alfalfa mills - alfalfa meal - which was bagged and shipped in boxcars. One mill was at Small and the other at Howard. Small had a spur with the switch on the north end. The loads went north and empties came from the north. 96 would set the empties out on Climax's house track and 95 would take them back to Small as needed."

Rod Riley writes, "Small had the Alfalfa Mill - a spur track with switch on the Emporia end. If we had to spot them an empty going south we would drop it. If we had more than one we'd shove it from Eureka. I also remember picking up 3 loads going south a couple of times and shoving them to Climax to get around them (5 miles). We usually worked this going North." (Circa 1970)

Railmodel Journal, Feb. 1999, had an article on modeling a modern alfalfa mill.

Remnants of an alfalfa operation remain today, but the tracks and dehydrator are long gone. Photo 1. Photo 2.

See the detailed account of Climax for more information on rail movements into Small.

Climax