Little Old Mills, by Marion Nicholl Rawson, 1935.
For if the flour be fresh and sound, Who careth in what mill 'twas ground? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Names and Names Along the sandy roads of the South, women and children tramp barefoot with croaker sacks of corn balanced upon their heads, going to the mill "to git a grist ground." Home made carts with all four wheels turning as different angles trundle along behind a tiny dark ox or a moth-eaten mule, stepping slowly through the deep sand, carrying sacks to the mill. In the 1500's they said, when the argument slowed down, "To the next, to the next, more sacks to the mill." Around stone-wall curves and sun-kissed shadowed trails, the farmer of the North either drives that unique spectacle, the horse, or his cart - over roads both a credit and a shame - "to mill," or a mill comes to his door to do his grinding. We are still mill wise, and fortunately, still holding last to the old mills built by our grandfathers and their sires. The gristmill was, at first, the "corn mill." Corn grew in North American like the dandelions, and when Captain John Smith told of his findings in the Southern parts he cold of cornfields which stretched for many miles. The Pilgrims found a countryside denuded of red men who had passed on three yeas before in the rush of the plague, but their cornfields lay cleared and waiting for replanting, and in hidden holes in the ground, stores of yellow kernels made that task possible. This naming of names is often a confusion and had better be settled once for all. Although we had our corn mills, it was "grist" which our forefathers carried to them. Since the 1500's, "grist" had been corn either before or after the grinding, and it was also "malt" when ground for the brewing. It was, again, anything taken to mill to be ground, and yet when a little later we learn some of the old things which were ground in our early mills we shall find it hard to call them grist. When we look at the real meaning of "corn" - and "a gristmill is for grinding corn" -there is further confusion. Corn is a grain or "a worn-down article," a small seed or " a word to denote the leading crop in a locality." This last definition brings us to the all-encompassing meaning of this simple, well-known work, for in different countries it means quite different grains, such as oats in Scotland and wheat in England, while to the foreigner our corn is "Indian corn" or "Indian" or "Maize." Then we have the words "flour" and "meal." Meal has a derivation meaning "ground in the mill," or " a flour of a coarser kind," and yet our usual use of the work is in connection with the finer grains, such as wheat or barley. The dictionary tells us that "flour is a finely ground meal of wheat or other grain," which mixes meal and flour so inextricably that to bake them thus would mean mental indigestion. However, when millstones become nicely enough balanced to grind wheat, the mill in which they ran was a "flouring mill." As a personal hint for some of us, this old maxim is here appropriately set down: "Wheat allowed to grow in the head as it stood, made bad bread which would not rise." One old miller had two sets of stones, one for provender and one for flour, and "provender" a lovely work which seems to tell of heavenly supply -means "any food for brute animals, dry food for beasts, as corn, hay or oats," so again we are at sea. Police Service Whatever was ground in the mill made a tremendous dust, a dust which has always been proverbial and cling about the miller through the ages. Whatever was ground in the mill invited the rats and mice from hear and far, until one wonders by what sleight-of-hand the species continued to endure before the coming of mills. A search for a mill which is not presided over by a lordly, well-nourished cat, who had the right of way before all else, would be as fruitless as the search of Diogenes for an honest man. There just is no such mill, so that before the miller greets his customer, the customer has felt the rub of an ached back and the wrapping of a thick tail about his ankles - the lord of the manor has given his welcome. The records of the past do not reveal the loss of rats and mice to the early miller, but last years figures show that farms alone in the United States lost two hundred and eleven million dollars worth, through their ministrations, and the ancient loss was probably in proportion. Many a gristmill was fixtured like a corn-crib, with its posts capped against these loving varmints of the grain, but there was no capping the doorway not the windows not the underpinning, nor even the cupola which often topped the gristmill as a way-out for the dust, and they entered in hordes. Perhaps more important than loss of grain was the loss of good sturdy tow-sacks or gunnysacks bags, for in the earliest years even these were spun and woven at home by the miller's womenfolk, and therefore meant time and labor. To a miller there was nothing more precious than a bag without a hole, a bag which could be trusted to carry its load without leaving a trail behind it, sometimes planting seed for a winding fringe of growing grain in the middle of a dusty country road. Such bright green fringes have been planted and thriven, and when the farmer had visited the tavern, as well as the mill, these fringes have zigzagged across the road in lovely loops and curves. Primitive Grinding We come now to the province of the little old mills which were worked by hand, the "beating mills" and "sweep and mortar mills" and the "pumping mills." One of these which stood thirty years ago in the mountains of the South, just over a stone wall from the dusty highroad, had a slow, even plump which to the local man meant pounding rain, but to the Northerner meant some weird, unexplainable happening which must be investigated. A scramble up the steep bank and over the wall and the ancient plumping process was revealed. From a wooden trough, fixed were the running brook must flow through it, the power for the mill flowed leisurely on in the summer morning sunlight. Just below this tiny waterfall was a wooden box fastened to the end of a long tree stump, supported by forked branches, which filled and emptied itself with no concern for what it might be accomplishing thereby at the other end of its support. It was all so simple when looked into, that filling and emptying, and the resultant rise and fall of the other end of the sweep, from which swung a great knot of hard wood, which, when dropped suddenly into the hollowed bee gum placed below it, pounded the corn piled there, until it was fine enough for corn pone. This was living through the efforts of almost unassisted Nature and gaining and easygoin"ness thought abundant. Here too must be recalled the little hand quern brought from the old country or contrived from rocks in the new land to do the vary first grinding of our forefathers. Shell, Thrash and Fan To shell, to thrash, to fan, these were all good homey tasks meaning a heap of work, but taken along with the day. Through their doing, the corn and other grains were made ready for the mill. Then came a day when they themselves had grown into mills, the hand sort and the power sort. Whether one's corn wee ground by pounding mill or wind or water, in the early days it must yet be shelled by hand, that is, the kernels removed from the cob. The usual corn-sheller for a couple of hundred years for many men, was any sort of makeshift with a sharp edge against which the ear of corn could be scraped to release its kernels. One popular device was the yard-long handle of an old iron peel, or brick oven shovel, fastened between table and slat-back chair and above a wicker "bushel." Here the children or the older folks would scrape away the hours of early candlelight, and go to bed leaving a pile of golden grain to show for their industry. An old case knife driven into the end of a board make a good corn-sheller, or a piece of broken scythe, or a hatchel fastened to some firm support. When the shelling was finished, the corn was ready for toting to mill for or ten miles away, and was often carried piggy-back on the farmer's shoulders. The advancing centuries brought the corn-sheller with was made of two heavy pieces of board which swung around upon each other, and ground their many iron nail points against the ear, by hand manipulation. Carts too or even spring wagons came to help the farmer on his way and the day to go to mill was more than ever something of a picnic. Where the grain grew on the end of a waving stalk, as wheat or oats, the treatment allotted to it was called threshing, soon changed to "thrashin" or even "trashin" The hand master flail was the tool for this work for so long a period than even today the old flails are still standing in their accustomed corners for occasional tasks. The flail was simply the human fist with something clutched within it which could reach farther than the stretch of the hand. It is an ancient tool of two rounded sticks, perhaps a yard high, linked loosely together with a throng or hempen string or finely braided corn husks. One stick is for holding, and when the farmer, or his hired-man or slave, swung it back over his shoulder and around his head, the other stick came down with a battering force, smiting the grain-length until the seeds came sprinkling out in all directions on the threshing floor, to be carefully swept up later after their stalks had been removed. In the South the Negroes sometimes threshed the grain by dancing upon it. Threshing by horse, especially in the South, was common, but it was not by what is known as horse power, but by horse hoof, that the work was done. The sheaves were laid out evenly in a great circle, sometimes within the barn and sometimes in a circle which surrounded it on the outside. A threshing floor could measure thirty feet square, and here the horses would be driven in pairs, a man riding on their backs. Out of doors the horses might be driven four or five abreast, with others coming on behind, and all pounding the earth and therefore the grain in their circling thunder, while other workers quickly turned and returned the sheaves after they had passed. An advance in horse threshing was made when the treadmill, already mentioned , came into use for the more prosperous farmer. As late as 1839 the following description of a treadmill appeared in the Cazenovia Union Herald as Cazenovia, New York: Rogers Patented Improved Endless Chain - Horse Power Treadmill. Thrashing grain, sawing wood with the circular saw, or longs with a cross cut saw. Substitute for horse power. Floor built on two strong wrought-iron chains, revolves over pulleys with cogs to work into links, and put in motion by horse's weight. One horse will thresh from fifty to one hundred bushels of grain in a day, and saw off a cord of hard wood in fifteen minutes. And this new invention was less than a hundred years ago. The power for these treadmills might be one horse or a pair, or one steer or a yoke of steers, or the lordly bull himself who, by being thus chained to hard labor, might be guaranteed to control his temper for some time afterward. In time, a wooden affair called a threshing mill appeared in old barns, and this was the simplest of devices with the wheel and axle called into use, and iron spikes protruding from the drum of the wheel. The grain, separated from the straw, had still to be cleaned, or fanned, or winnowed. Just dropping the grain from a high place to a low one on a windy day was often the only fanning machine, for the wind would toss the chaff away and leave the grain clean. Wheat was sometimes winnowed with a sheet or bed coverlet tied up by two corners and swung by two men, while another slowly poured in the mixed chaff and wheat. Then a wooden fan, or "skept," like a semicircular tray with a low back running halfway round, and a curved handle at each end, took the uncleaned wheat and caught it time after time as the farmer threw it in the air depending upon the wind to lend a hand. To Mill, To Mill The dawn breaks and the kitchen fire is already lighted and burning beneath the baked beans and doughnuts, the griddle cakes and the warmed up potatoes. The cart, filled yesterday with the precious grain in bags, is ready and waiting for Old Sam, the horse, to be hooked in. "A-goin' to mill!" -magic words, and ones which loom large for the eight-year-old boy who has begged and won the longed-for trip and is even submitting to soap on his brown neck until the skin looks like raw beef "A-going' to mill," will compensate for all that must be borne from mothers and sisters who say with scorn, "S'pose now you was to get killed, with a dirty neck, and you a great boy grown." There will be not only the ride and a possible bear on the way, but the turning wheel with its intriguing paddles inviting to applause, and above all, the men and others boys who are strangest and most wonderful of all. There is much for a boy to learn and this will be his first chance, perhaps, to study the why of the millstones, the hopper, the mill shaft, and watch the silent flow of the water as it skips away in the tail race to nobody knows where; some folks say it finds its way to the great Atlantic Ocean, but of course that can never be - this simple little brook beside a simple mill. His father's corn, that old home corn that took so much work and grew so familiar to them all, and so hated when the swimming hole called, there it went into the bin leading to the hopper to find its way down to the eye of the stoned hidden out of sight. It would have been hard for this boy of square hopper days to have watched the paths of the corn in the days when the hopper was a huddle of slanting boards made to fit the corner above the little old hand querns. When he reaches home again, the cornfield will have a new meaning to him, and his Johnny cake be sweeter for knowing how it came; even the tedious shelling across a broken knife blade will never gain seem quite so meaningless. The name of Oliver Evans should be remembered as perhaps the most outstanding one among the American millwrights. Evans lived in Philadelphia and toward the end of the 1700's opened up many new vistas to the ordinary miller, and it is said that his influence in the country's milling lasted until about 1870 when new methods along all lines had arrived to supersede the old. It was this millwright who thought of building a tiny elevator, based on the old principle of fixing an endless chain hung with tiny cups above an open will to bring up the water without pump or sweep or hand-rope. Today, hidden in their own secret cupboards in the walls of old mills, these little metal cups from beneath the stones, to dump it into a bin for storage. From these bins the flour or meal would later to rushing down a wooden shute into the gunnysack held ready to receive it, which will then be tied at the neck and have their string cut with a worn-out knife stuck handy in the well-slashed wall. Below the coming of the tiny elevators (of leather belting with metal or wooden cups), the newly ground meal was ladled out of the pile beneath the millstones, with great wooden shovels. "Run of mill" was the usual, the everyday occurrence.
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