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.
