Strangers riding through the state on the Corn Belt Railroad saw the words, "The Golden Belt Elevator Company" on elevators all along the line.

But few people knew then that the "Company" had become a partnership between John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge and less than half a dozen railroad men, with Barclay owning seventy-five per cent of the partnership and with State Senator Bemis the attorney for the company.
That year the railroad officials who were making money out of the Golden Belt Elevator Company were obliging, and Barclay made a contract with them to ship all grain from the Golden Belt Company's elevators in cars equipped with the Barclay Economy Rubber Strip, and he sold these strips to the railroads for four dollars apiece and put them on at the elevators.

He shipped ten thousand cars that year, and Lycurgus Mason hired two men to help him in the strip factory.

And John Barclay, in addition to the regular rebate, made forty thousand dollars that he did not have to divide.

The next year he leased three large mills and took over a score of elevators and paid Lycurgus twenty dollars a week, and Lycurgus deposited money in the bank in his own name for the first time in his life.
As the century clanged noisily into its busy eighties, Adrian P.
Brownwell creaked stiffly into his forties.