I pushed through the tangled thickets under the scrubby oaks, and a minute after stood before the structure. It was a mill which even at this date would, if new, have been suited to a more open country. The side that faced us was farthest from the river. One door, up to which rotten steps led, and two windows, through one of which the tree before mentioned, spread its heavy limbs, were on the front. The siding was falling and hanging loosely in places from the upright timbers, and the entire structure was fast becoming a skeleton, for all the clapboards had been torn by the wind or thievish hands from the three remaining sides. The roof, in part, had fallen in, but had been caught by the shaky stringers of the upper, half-story floor. The spot on the river bank was peculiarly suited for a mill site. The channel of the stream above was rock bound, the banks being steep and narrow. Just before it reached the mill the body of waters compressed into an impetuous volume, shot over a fall of twenty feet. An outlet had been blasted through the solid rock close by the side of the fall, and a wooden race set up leading to the mill. This race had long since disappeared, worn away by time and water. The old wheel, though, hung in its place beside the structure almost under the fall, and above the mad waters, boiling and foaming below.
Going around to one of the sides, we managed to clamber in and on the plank floor. There was half a partition through the center, forming on either side two rooms, each about 20 X 25 feet in dimensions. The mill-stones were yet in place, but the hopper and grain bins were missing.
We seated ourselves on the floor at the back side of the building, and with our feet hanging over the green, rotten wheel, with the thin spray of the cataract now and then touching us, and the turbulent river sweeping onward below, he began as follows:
“When I came here from Charleston, South Carolina, and settled, in the spring of 184-, the first thing I found necessary, after building my house, was a mill. As many families, apparently, lived in these valleys then as live here now. I was compelled to go to Murphy, a distance of eighteen miles, to get my flour and meal, or take my grain to a primitive hopper, two miles below on this river, and wait a day for it to grind a bushel. Either was an exasperating procedure. This site seemed the best adapted one along the river. The race was formed, a foundation laid, and, by the aid of a temporary saw, enough lumber was gotten out to finish this mill complete by the following summer.
“Well, time went by; the mill run smoothly, and with it I managed to make enough to keep my family. One morning, however, on entering here I saw that the wheel, which I left running for the night, in order to grind out an extra amount of meal, had stopped, while the water was still pouring on it. On examination I found the dead body of a young man, a farmer, who lived on the slope of Deer mountain, hanging fastened to the lowest paddle of the wheel. All that could be learned of his untimely end was that he had left home for an evening’s trout-fishing the day before. He had undoubtedly fallen into the deep, swift stream above; had been drowned; swept through the race down on to the wheel; and, his clothes catching on the splintered paddle, he had hung there.
“A short time after the last sad occurrence, a neighbor’s boy fell through the trap door and broke his neck. Superstitious people then began to whisper that a spell was on the place. They had had, as yet, no ocular demonstration of what they imagined and reported, but such was the influence that my mill was avoided at night, travelers beating a new path around it through the forest. Of course, this talk had no effect upon me, and in fact I rather liked it, for, as far as I was able to perceive, it kept a class of indigent mountaineers away from the mill, whom I had reason before to suspect of grinding their corn surreptitiously at night.
“But in the spring of 1861 something really strange did occur. My youngest brother was one day with me at the mill. I had left him inside here while I had gone some distance back into the woods to get a second-growth hickory. Probably half an hour had passed and I was returning, when just before coming in sight of the mill I heard angry voices. One voice was that of my brother, the other I could not recognize; neither had I time to consider, for suddenly the report of a fire-arm sounded in that direction. I hallooed loudly at the moment I heard it, and at the same time came out of the wood. A comparatively clear space, with the exception of a few large trees, was between me and the mill. I saw no one near but my brother, and he was leaning partly out the front window there, where now grows the red maple.
“ ‘Halloo! what have you shot?’ I shouted.
“There was no answer.
“The day was growing terribly dark. Black clouds, heavy with moisture, were filling and piling deep the entire face of the sky between these circling mountains. The lightning had not yet begun to play, but it would not have taken a prophet to tell of its speedy coming.