The Miller in Eighteenth-Century Virginia / An Account of Mills & the Craft of Milling, as Well as a Description of the Windmill near the Palace in Williamsburg

by Thomas K. Ford

Other phases of governmental interest in grist milling involved the exercise of the right of eminent domain to provide watermill sites; the requirement that roads be established and maintained leading to mills; that mill dams be wide enough at the top for a carriage way, include locks for navigation and fish slopes if necessary, and not be built above or too close below an existing dam; the inspection of flour to assure uniformly high quality, free from impurities; the requirement that millers have and use measures tested for accuracy; and so on. From such legislation it will be seen that milling, ostensibly a purely private venture, partook strongly of the nature of a public utility.

In view of the mill’s vital importance to the community, as revealed in this legislative history, it is no surprise to learn that the miller was considered essential too. Along with certain officials of the colony, clergymen, plantation overseers, the gaoler, schoolmasters, and some other groups deemed necessary to orderly civil life, millers were exempt from service in the militia. Furthermore, since militia musters were often occasions of prolonged revelry, any miller who “shall presume to appear at any muster” was to be fined one hundred pounds of tobacco or be “tied Neck and Heels” for up to twenty minutes. Only when the need for foot soldiers became all-consuming in 1780 was the militia exemption lifted. Until then the miller was expected, and obliged, to keep his nose to the millstone.

“Militia musters were often occasions of prolonged revelry.” Adapted from an engraving by the English painter and caricaturist of the eighteenth century, William Hogarth.

The miller, thus, seems to have had a split personality—at least in the public mind. On the one hand he possessed an ancient reputation for dishonesty that called for repeated legislative curbs and punishments. On the other hand, he was so indispensable to community welfare that the law got after him if he took a day off for public carousing as other men did.

At least since Greek and Roman times the miller, who performed a task once relegated to women and slaves, was traditionally held in low esteem by reason of his calling. Yet some colonial millers were respected and influential men, and sometimes men of substance. John Jenny built the windmill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1636 and was chosen by his fellow townsmen to represent them in the General Court. Two years later he was indicted for failing to grind his neighbor’s grain well and seasonably. The nearby town of Rehoboth similarly elected its miller to the General Court. But he refused to leave his mill in order to serve as deputy and was fined!

In colonial Virginia the social position of the miller was less subject to violent fluctuation than would seem to have been the case in New England. In fact, the Virginia miller was uniformly a man of low estate, far inferior to the owner-operator of a mill in a New England town, and outranked also by the sturdy bourgeois millers of the middle colonies. Those who worked for wages enjoyed few privileges, while the many Virginia millers who were either Negro slaves or white indentured servants had little social standing. The records contain a goodly number of references to runaway millers who were indentured servants, convict servants, or slaves; if any Virginia miller in colonial times rose to a position of importance, no record has yet been found.

THE SAID WILLIAM ROBERTSON’S WIND MILL ...

Most windmills belonged to one or other of the two basic categories: post mill or tower mill. The truth of this general rule is easily proved by the exception—the composite mill that belonged to neither group, but was in effect a post mill set on top of a tower. Another truism—perhaps without any exception—states that since every mill was custom designed and made by hand, no two were exactly alike.

Every English and colonial millwright had his favorite tricks of design and construction, and often the mills of a region showed a family resemblance that distinguished them from the mills of the neighboring shire or colony. In addition, improvements and refinements were developed from time to time and gradually put into use. Many of them, like the grain elevating machinery invented by Oliver Evans of Delaware and the adjustable lattice sails of the English inventor Sir William Cubbitt, came long after 1716-1723, the years during which Robertson’s original mill was built.