The Old Mill and the Covered Bridge

by Anonymous

The Old Grist Mill

In the early days of the seventeenth century countless little mills buzzed busily throughout the inhabited part of this country, supplying many of the things essential to the life of the colonists. They were operated by hand power, animal power, and wind and water power. Sometimes the water power was furnished by tides. It is interesting to note that, in their primitive way, they projected the mechanical principles used in present-day industry. The staff, post, wheel, crude pulley, wedge, inclined plane, and screw were all in use. Those pioneers builded well, little dreaming of the wonders that would be unfolded by the industrial revolution.

The grist mill represents a striking evolution in the process of satisfying the hunger of man. The Indians pounded corn in a hollowed rock which was a crude mortar. Peasants all over the globe performed the same kind of service to obtain flour from wheat. It was the earliest hand power era. The Puritans, Cavaliers and Pilgrims probably obtained their first grist in this way. They were familiar with the use of grinding stones in Europe, so it was not long before the grist mill sprang up in the first clearings. As a matter of fact, some of the first millstones in this country were imported from England and France. The first mills were operated by hand or horse power. Then came the familiar water wheels. One of the characteristic features of the old grist mill was its picturesque location.

The old grist mill was a sort of community center for the people of the adjacent countryside. The “jolly miller”, as he has been designated in song and story, like the New England tavern keeper of the Concord coach days, was an important personage. He was a friend and philosopher to all and sundry. His mill, which he often built with his own hands, was a rallying place—a social rendezvous. Here news was gathered and gossip garnered and spread. The mill had a social value akin to that of the old country store with its potbellied stove and cracker barrel. Over this informal country club presided the “jolly miller.” Many poets have sung of his virtues.

Many of the old millers were artisans of the highest skill, full brothers to the builders of the covered bridges, whose craftsmanship perished with them. One of them was Oliver Evans, a noted millwright who lived in Pennsylvania in the late 1700’s. He introduced various innovations. One of them was a tiny elevator with metal cups to carry ground grain from the stones to the bins for storage. Before the advent of these elevators the newly ground meal was ladled out of the pile beneath the millstones with great wooden shovels.

This interior view of the Old Mill in Carillon Park shows the mechanism by which power was transmitted from the water wheel to the grinding stone.

The grist mills were usually run by water wheels. These were made up of two immense wheels on the same shaft with spokes of heavy flat boards mortised to fit close together at the hub and joined together at the rim by paddles, floats, or palettes of heavy wood which made an endless, revolving stairway. Some wheels had compartments on each float, the better to catch the water. The overshot wheel required a dam and was turned by the weight of the water which fell on it from above.

The wheel was located wherever the dam or flume was placed. Usually it was exposed to the weather but sometimes it rested under a shed or penthouse. The wheel pit was a danger hole. If a man fell into it while the wheel was turning he had little chance of escape. Millers were known to have been drowned in their own mills when someone opened the water gate at the wrong time.

There were two kinds of mills—the water wheel construction and the tub mill. A tub mill was the simplest and cheapest of all types of grist mill. In it the wheel was located down in a pit or “tub” and lay horizontally with a vertical axle, whereas the water wheel type was a wheel rotating on a vertical plane and mounted on a horizontal axis. One of the first mills hereabouts was a tub mill built by Daniel C. Cooper where The National Cash Register Company lumber yard now stands.

The millstones were fashioned out of material usually common to the locality in which they were used. New Hampshire granite was widely employed and what was called burrstone, originally imported from France, and later discovered in Arkansas, also came into use. A sandstone found in New York State found its way to many mills. Before roads were opened up to the West and South, millstones for the new settlements were broken up, carried on pack horses to their destination, and then assembled with iron bands to hold them together.

In size the millstones ranged from one to two feet in thickness and from three to seven feet in diameter. All stones were “furrowed”, as the old phrase went. This meant that they were “packed” so as to carry the meal from the center of the stone to the edges. Thus all the grain was ground. The nether, or lower stone, harder of the two, was fixed, that is, immovable. The upper stone revolved with the mill spindle and could be raised or lowered. Each stone was pierced with an “eye”, a hole through which the spindle, or shaft, ran. The grain poured through the “eyes.” Due to almost constant wear the millstones had to be “dressed” periodically.

The face of each burrstone used for grinding wheat or corn consists of raised sections (lands) and furrows (grooves). Whole grain is crushed by the action of the lands and passes to the outside of the revolving stones through the grooves. Below, a miller in the Loranger Grist Mill, Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Mich., is preparing the face of a burrstone with a special tool.

It is a tribute to the efficiency of the old grist mills that long after they had been displaced by steam-driven plants, many people preferred, and some still prefer, the product ground out by the millstones. They maintain that the stones produce a higher grade of flour than can be made by modern machine methods. So great was the demand for the millstone-ground flour that a manufacturing firm in Indiana made a miniature grist mill equipped with stones which was used in many private homes and on some farms. Power was furnished by a motor, a far cry from the old water wheel.

This picturesque mill is located just north of Dayton and is more than 100 years old. It is in operating condition.

In the heyday of the grist mill one further operation followed the grinding. The grist was put through a bolting cloth which separated the bran. Sometimes the bolting was done in a grist mill. More often the sifting took place in what was called a bolting mill.

Many people who never saw or even heard of a grist mill know about the millstones because of the popular sayings that have sprung up around them. Everybody has heard the phrase, “he is caught between the upper and nether millstones,” which signifies that the person referred to is in a jam. Another phrase is, “It’s all grist that comes to his mill,” meaning that the individual gets all the breaks and capitalizes every advantage. Then too, there is the phrase, “run of the mill,” which has become synonymous with routine product or performance, and “he has a millstone ’round his neck.” Perhaps the best known of all is the saying, “The mills of the gods grind slowly yet they grind exceeding fine.” Many a man has had this hurled at him when his sins of omission or commission have eventually overtaken him.

The toll for having grain ground in a grist mill was usually paid in kind. In the pioneer days the fee for grinding was four quarts out of each bushel. Later this was reduced to two quarts. Some millers received one-sixth of the grain they ground. Millers also kept what was called the “mill ring.” This was the grist that remained around the stones after the grinding was finished. No wonder the old millers waxed fat, not only in girth but in worldly goods as well.

Although battered by time and outdistanced in the march of progress, many grist mills still stand as a link between the slow sedate era of American production and these humming times of swift and continuous output. The Stony Brook Mill at Stony Brook, Long Island, is an example of how the old mills endure. Built in 1699, it is still doing business in the same quaint stone structure that housed it at birth.

Grist mills are closely associated with the early history of Dayton and its pioneer personalities. The site of Dayton was purchased in 1795 by a group of Revolutionary soldiers seeking new homesites. It was laid out as a town the same year by Israel Ludlow and Daniel C. Cooper, and named in honor of Jonathan Dayton, a soldier in the War of Independence, who later became a United States Senator from New Jersey. Dayton was incorporated as a town in the year 1805.

The old Patterson Mill stood on Brown Street at approximately the present location of the NCR factory.

It was advertised as the Rubicon Factory.

THE RUBICON
FACTORY,
Two miles below Dayton.

The subscribers inform their friends and the public, that their Carding and Spinning machines are now in complete operation, having this season made considerable improvement in their Factory—they are prepared to Card and Spin wool in the best manner.

For	Carding common wool	6 1·4 cts. per lb
”	Spinning chain per doz.	18 3·4 cents,
”	do. filling per do.	15 do.
”	Carding, Spinning and Weaving Cloth in 500 Reed,	31 1·4 do.
”	do.	all above 500 in proportion,
”	do. Casinett,	do.
”	do. Satinett,	37 1·2 cts.

Every attention shall be paid to work committed to them, that it shall be done in the best manner and to the satisfaction of those employing them.

Produce will be received, in part payment, at the market price.

K. PATTERSON,
H. HYATT.

May 12th, 1823. 73 if

An old water wheel near Dayton, long since retired from active service but still in position. The millstone in the foreground was probably brought here on pack horses for its sections are bound together with iron bonds.

In those early days, manufacturing in the Miami Valley was limited. Here, as elsewhere throughout the country, the stone block for crushing corn was succeeded by the hand mill which, in turn, was superseded by a mill operated by horse power. The next step was the change to water power which brought the water wheel into use.

The first mills immediately around Dayton were built by Cooper who at one time owned most of the downtown district. He set up the first mills within the limits of Dayton proper at the head of Mill Street. The street received its name in 1795 because of the ease with which mills could be located there.

About 1798 Cooper moved to a 322-acre farm located south of Dayton where he built a grist mill. It was known as Rubicon Farm. Through subsequent events it became bound up in the history of Dayton. It was bought by Col. Robert Patterson and later became the site of the NCR plant, as well as Old River Recreational Park and the adjacent lands.

Patterson was not only an able soldier and a doughty woodsman, but something of a statesman as well. He founded in Kentucky what is today the city of Lexington, heart of the famed bluegrass country. One of the early governors referred to him as “one of the earliest, bravest, and best of the pioneers and heroes who made the Great West.”

Once in Dayton, Colonel Patterson impressed his personality upon the town. He owned a grist mill, a fulling mill, a saw mill, and a double carding machine. All these were located on the Rubicon Farm. They were at their best around 1809. In October 1815, while in full operation, all the mills were destroyed by fire. Always resourceful, Patterson recovered quickly from the blow. He built a grist mill known as “The Stone Mill” which became a Dayton landmark. It was located on the Brown Street road where the Rubicon crossed it. Stonemill Road takes its name from this fact.

Rubicon Farm was destined to be linked with the drama of American industry. Colonel Patterson had ten children, the youngest of whom was Jefferson. He succeeded to ownership of part of the estate and the mills. Here on December 13, 1844, his son, John H. Patterson, founder of The National Cash Register Company and a notable figure in industrial development, was born and spent his boyhood, serving a hardy apprenticeship in work.

As the years sped on, Dayton and vicinity became an important milling center. By the winter of 1822-23 there were fifty grist mills along the Miami River. Montgomery County, alone, had eleven grist mills.

While some of the old grist mills still perform their time-honored task to the music of purling mill streams, the vast majority have vanished, or stand as crumbling landmarks of another generation. Yet in their day they were indispensable to life and labor. The memory of them will always be as green as the moss that clung to the dripping paddles of the great water wheels.

When the mill was not in operation, the water was deflected from the water wheel, as shown in this view of a mill near Bristol, Tenn.