As it turned out, the planting of grain received less than prime attention. Defense against the Indians was a more pressing demand, and many of the gentlemen settlers were unwilling to soil their hands with menial labor. An exploring party, however, reported that it had observed at the falls of the James River five or six islands “very fitt for the buylding of water milnes thereon.”
From an etching by James D. Smillie entitled “Old Mills, Coast of Virginia.” The original—now in the New York Public Library—was made in 1890, probably on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Several years seem to have passed before any mill was built in Virginia. In 1620 the Company sent word that it considered the construction of watermills of first importance. The next year it specifically instructed the colonists to erect corn mills and bake houses in every borough.
Actually by 1621 the first mill had been put up by Governor Yeardley on his own plantation near the falls of the James River. But it was a windmill, not a watermill, and for at least four years seems to have been the sole facility of its kind in the whole coastal wilderness of North America.
The first mill in the Massachusetts Bay colony, where waterfalls were considerably more frequent and closer to the coast than in tidewater Virginia, was also a windmill, built in 1631. In New Amsterdam the first mill, again a windmill, was erected in 1632. In Virginia by 1649 there were nine mills in operation, four windmills and five watermills, and the number had grown as fast or faster in other areas.
Exposed coastal areas on Cape Cod, around Newport, Rhode Island, and on the eastern end of Long Island, as well as on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Virginia were found especially well adapted to windmills. Massachusetts in particular saw a rapid rise in milling. It was there, under the aegis of John Pearson, “the father of the milling industry,” that commercial milling got its early start in America.
At somewhat later stages a similar boom in milling activity took place in New Netherland, New Sweden, and their successor English colonies. For several decades New York held the crown as the wheat-growing, grist-milling, and flour-exporting capital of the New World, only to be superseded about 1700 by Pennsylvania.
WHERE TOBACCO WAS KING
In Maryland and Virginia, where tobacco was the king-sized money crop, grist-milling developed along a somewhat different path. Throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century the tobacco colonists grew wheat and corn for home consumption only. And “home consumption” in most instances meant literally that. The typical plantation, an almost self-sufficient community in many ways, raised wheat enough for the owner’s family and sufficient corn to feed the slaves and animals.