R. L. Coon Excavating Inc.

About R. L. Coon Excavating Inc.

The grain elevators east of Rushville stand taller than anything else on the Rush County skyline, and the gravel lanes that lead to the farms around them are the same ones R. L. Coon Excavating grades and ditches the rest of the year with the machines it turns to plowing come winter. An excavator or a loader can push snow a driveway plow can't—drifts packed hard against a barn or piled where a field's edge funnels it into one long ridge—so the crew's calls tend to be the ones nobody else wants first. Work starts before first light most winter mornings, machines moving down farm lanes while the elevator lights are still the only ones on for miles. Flatrock creek bottoms nearby hold their frost longest, and the lanes crossing them ice before the open fields do. By the time the farm trucks are moving grain again, the lane behind them is already open to the road.