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Photo of a man identified as “Scotty” with “Miss Triad,” company airplane of the Trinidad Bean and Elevator Company located in Trinidad, CO, ca. 1930.

All of the information I obtained about “Miss Triad” is contained in a September 5, 1930, Greeley Tribune article titled “Local Employees of Bean Buyer Ride in Flying Office.”  It reported that “Miss Triad’ had landed at the local airport two  days earlier carrying company president L. W. Van Vleet, Van Vleet’s private secretary, Ruth Tallman, and Sterling-based company manager for northern Colorado and Wyoming, Ted Duncan.  Following a meeting with local bean buyer, Charles Challgren, and Milliken buyer, Frank Stevenson, both were taken for a ride over the city, as were Challgren’s employees and a person identified as W. C. Drake.   

The Tribune article identifies “Miss Triad” as a five-passenger Stinson-Detroiter monoplane, a product of the Stinson Aircraft Syndicate in Detroit.   “Lt. Hazeltine (sic)” is identified as the pilot of the plane.  This was a reference to Frances T. Haseltine, pilot and salesman  for the Trinidad Bean and Elevator Company.  A Missouri native with a teaching degree from his home state and a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from M.I.T, he held the rank of lieutenant with the 120th observation squadron of the Colorado National Guard.  In July of 1931, Haseltine and Martin Gleason, sales manager for   Trinidad Bean and Elevator, would die in a plane crash at the Trinidad airport.  It appeared Haseltine was preparing to land the plane (it was a plane other than “Miss Triad”) when it suddenly took a nose dive from 500 feet and crashed.  Surviving Haseltine were his wife, Helen, and three small children.  Gleason was survived by his parents, who lived in Boulder.  It is unknown whether Haseltine and Gleason were on a business flight at the time.   President Lynn William Van Vleet was a man ahead of his time in his use of an airplane for business travel, and he made heavy use of it, having traveled over 12,000 miles by air in the month prior to his Greeley visit.  Flying made sense, given the fact that the company had offices in most principal U.S. cities.  By 1922, the company, which was founded by Van Vleet in Trinidad in 1917, was the largest shipper of pinto beans in the world.  It would later move its offices to Denver.  A reminder that pinto beans, like any other commodity, possess a tangible dollar value was reflected in a 1933 Greeley Tribune article reporting the theft of 26 100-pound bags of pinto beans from the company’s elevator warehouse in Hudson during a time of rising bean prices.   Given that the Depression was under way at the time, desperation may have been a factor as well. 

The word “elevator” in the name of the Trinidad Bean and Elevator Company refers to a necessary component of their business – i.e., the facilities for receiving, weighing, testing and storing the beans bought by the company and awaiting sale.   The term “elevator” in its narrowest sense refers to the machinery in these facilities which lifts the incoming beans to the top of the storage tower, at which point they are guided by gravity through spouts or carried on conveyors to the appropriate storage bin(s).      

Van Vleet, originally from Michigan, was also a cattle rancher and breeder of purebred Arabian horses, bringing his first horses over from North Africa in 1932.  In 1936, he bought the 13,000 acre Tom Tucker Ranch north of Nederland for his cattle and horses and christened it the Lazy V V Ranch.  In addition to the Lazy V V, Van Vleet would acquire land in Boulder County for pasturing and for cattle and horse breeding.  One of those acquisitions, made in 1942, was the Meadow Brook Farm owned by Albert and Addie Viele at the intersection of Cherryvale Road and South Boulder Road in Boulder.  The Viele-Van Vleet Farmstead would be designated a City of Boulder Historic Landmark in 1995.  Van Vleet would sell the Lazy V V in 1951, after which it would be known as the Caribou Ranch.  

Van Vleet died in Denver in 1961 at age 68.  His remains, and those of his wife, Rose, are interred at Denver’s Fairmount Cemetery.

In 1978, the Trinidad Bean and Elevator Company merged with Benham and Company in Texas to form the Trinidad Benham Corporation, currently headquartered in Denver.  According to their website, the company is “a leading marketer of dry edible beans, rice and aluminum products, and our diverse product offerings allow us to bring more to the customer.”

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