All these things we thought about as we went about the business of restoration.
IV
The peace and quiet of the mill pond every Saturday morning was shattered by the rumblings of two water pumps. These pumps had to suck out the water from the pit in the flume to enable us to even see what we were trying to do. Three or maybe four, very muddy characters, attired in the necessary garments to withstand the cold, were always in the depths of the mill, working in the mud, sand, gravel and debris, and at times it seemed as though we were merely moving these from one place to another, rather than disposing of them.
We finally managed to extricate the old turbine. The simple mechanism and design of this ancient piece of machinery to me is always marvelous. We had hoped to renovate the old turbine and put it back in its place, but age and rust made this impossible, and the turbine now rests on the shore of the pond for all to see.
In the process of moving all the mud and sand, we uncovered the remains of the original flume or sluiceway leading from the mill pond to the wheel pit. We found the flume to be about five and a half feet wide and originally about ten feet high and, roughly, thirty feet long. The sides were planked against 8 × 8 hard pine timbers which were in turn cut or tenoned into 8 × 8 mortised supports, twelve on each side of the flume, about two feet apart, and each dowelled or pinned with one and a half inch hard pine trunnells (wooden pins to you).
We were now down about twelve feet in the dike of the flume, and we had to hand shovel and excavate all around each stub of these timbers, knocking back the dowels and prying out each stub. These uprights had been broken off when the flume was filled in. Every one of the stubs and the pins was bright and new as the day it was put in. Packed around each section of each stub was about six inches of semi-hard blue clay.
Apparently wood or any substance long immersed in water will last forever and undoubtedly the clay we found packed around each helped to preserve this wood. We threw the stubs upon the top of the dike, and they were not in the air and light two or three days before they turned gray, discolored and aged looking.
George Woodbury, in his book, “John Goffe’s Mill”, says:
“Wood can be almost indefinitely preserved if it is kept either consistently dry or consistently wet all the time. Let it get wet and dry out a few times and it quickly decomposes. In Egypt where it never rains, wooden objects are found well preserved after countless centuries of burial. In Switzerland, the piles driven into the Lac Neuchatel by the aboriginal lake dwellers are still sound after two thousand years.”