“The whole of my Force,” Washington wrote in 1774, “is in a manner confind to the growth of Wheat and Manufacturing of it into Flour.” Some of the wheat he proposed to sell in London if the price were right, if the freight and commission charges were not too high, and “if our Commerce with Great Britain is kept open (which seems to be a matter of great doubt at present).” He did ship some flour directly to the West Indies but disposed of most of his “superfine flour of the first quality” through merchants in Norfolk and Alexandria.
Washington, like Carter and other Virginia merchant millers, felt the loss of West Indian markets after the Revolution. But he continued his interest in milling into the better times that followed the establishment of a stable national government. Washington, in fact, received one of the first licenses to use the milling improvements invented by the Delaware millwright, Oliver Evans. As late as 1799, the year of his death, he wrote that “as a farmer, Wheat and Flour constitute my principal Concerns.”
As a millowner, one of Washington’s chief worries seems to have been very much the same as that of William Byrd a century earlier, namely, to obtain the services of an honest and diligent miller to operate his mill. The problem had faced Robert Carter, too, who sent inquiries as far as New Jersey. That other Virginia planter-entrepreneurs faced the same challenge is apparent in many advertisements in the Virginia Gazette of the time.
When Washington rebuilt the Dogue Run mill, he was fortunate in hiring William Roberts as miller. Not only was Roberts an honest man in his employer’s opinion, but also a highly capable miller. Washington gave him full credit for the fact that flour from Dogue Run commanded top prices in Alexandria and the West Indies markets.
For several years the arrangement was ideal. Then Roberts grew more and more interested in a wheat product other than flour. By 1783 he had become such a drunken sot that the squire of Mount Vernon began seeking a replacement, only to relent when the miller promised to reform his ways. However, this pledge, like its predecessors, soon dissolved in alcohol, and Washington finally fired Roberts.
A substitute, Joseph Davenport by name, was lured from Pennsylvania but turned out to be an inferior miller and as slothful as Roberts had been unreliable. Even so, Washington tolerated him until Davenport’s death in 1796. His successor, Callahan, was a competent miller but again far from industrious, and demanded higher wages than the mill could support. In desperation, Washington hunted up Roberts and offered to rehire him on condition of “a solemn and fixed determination to refrain from liquor.” This arrangement fell through—perhaps Roberts celebrated too heartily—and the President finally leased the mill to his overseer, James Anderson.
ALL THAT THE LAW ALLOWS
It was said earlier that legal restrictions on milling crossed the Atlantic along with the jolly practitioners of that craft. Indeed, the history of milling in the colonies is fully punctuated by the regular passage or amendment of laws to “rectifie the great abuse of millers,” as the first such law in Virginia put it. This first Virginia law appeared as early as 1645 and fixed the allowable toll at a generous one-sixth. Such a law had been passed ten years earlier in the Massachusetts Bay colony.
In neither colony, however, did the law seem to be effective without frequent amendment. The Massachusetts General Court repassed and strengthened its regulation five separate times in thirty years; the Virginia burgesses acted the same number of times in an even shorter period. A prohibition against taking excessive toll and the setting of penalties and fines for violation figured in every revision of the Virginia law throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The basic regulation, passed in 1705, provided:
That all millers shall grind according to turn; and shall well and sufficiently grind the grain brought to their mills; and shall take no more for toll or grinding, than one eighth part of wheat, and one sixth part of Indian corn.