Little Old Mills, by Marion Nicholl Rawson, 1935.
You measure your neighbor's corn by you own bushel. Old Saw.
Caste in Grains It took many processes to get the sown seed ready for human consumption and when it was all done by handiwork it must have been vastly more appreciated than it is today. After all the threshing and shelling and grinding there was still the boulting to be done. A boulting mill might be an independent concern or a part of the gristmill itself. Old old miller says that he "put small bolts into my sawmill and made it do for quite a while." A boulting mill was a place where meal was sifted or boulted, or flour separated from the bran or skin of the grain or ground grain assorted into piles of its component parts. Word specialist regret the dropping of the U from the word "boult" as is usual today, because the latter is definitely a different affair from "to bolt" which means several other things than sifting flour. Boulting was as much a home industry as a public one, for the making of the boult, or boulting reel or boltynge pipe, or boultying poke, or boultying tubbe, or boulting cloth wheel, or bolter, or the simple wooden frame so variously called, was of stout slats quite easy to fashion, and since no boulting mill was run by water until 1730, home, hand or horse power was as good as that of a regular miller. This boulting frame was perhaps as long as a man, and formed with the wooden slats running long wise into a sort of octagonal prism, and strong enough or hold a covering of ten or twelve yards of narrow boulting cloth. AS to this fabric through which the grain was sifted, we have a large selection from which to choose, namely: thinne canvas, a peculiar texture, canvasse, coarse boulting, fine fabric usually of unsized silk, finest silk fabric made, silk threads covered with gum, and the grains were also "sersed through lawne." Sarah Prideaux, a Maryland belle, wove silken boulting cloth for her father's mill with her own hands. Later years developed for some millers the long horizontal boulting box, which was kept in a constant state of tremble or ague, so that the grain danced about on its four grades of wire meshing until they had found their separate homes. The boulting wheel once covered was set at such an angle upon its axis that as it turned about, and received the flour from the upper end, only the finest of the flour particles would be able to penetrate the very fine cloth which covered the upper end; the next space farther down was made to receive some of the leftovers of the "finest" and some of the larger grains which made up the "middlings;" then came the "shorts" and last of all the bran, which was the miller's velvet in the matter of profit. Today when we say that some thing is mighty fine, we do not mean that it is ground into infinitesimal particles, but that it is of the top-notch grade quality, and it is easy to see how this meaning has come down to us from the old boulting mill. When all of the grain has been separated into its different sizes and grades, it was gathered from its separate bins to be cooled after its heating task of being boulted by being dropped from one floor to another where the air passed through it and kept it from rotting in its frictional heat. The same care in cooling had been taken after the grinding, least the heat in the meal should soften the gum or "size" in the boulting cloth. There remain today a few scattered mills where "water ground" cornmeal is still obtainable, in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Maine, and perhaps other States. This "water ground" is the real corn meal which each grain a distinct entity rather than a particle in a mass of yellow powder from which true Johnny cake can never spring. Even in a far-back country section where a mill-brook is tumbling rapturously down below some gentle, slumbering mill, and the world of prices and markets seem on some other planet, one will still find some such sign over the mill door, -TODAY'S PRICES AT MILL. The supposition is that the prices listed below are the standard prices for the country on this special day, but how the miller knows what they may be, is always a matter of wonderment. There they are, boldly chalked up on the old black painted signboard, superfines, shorts, middlings, carnel and provender, among as many more of the kin called "meal and cracked corn, oats and mixed feeds." Back of the loaf is the snowy flour, And back of the flour is the mill, And back of the mill is the sun and shower, And love and the Father's Will, Old Southern Favorites: Anon.
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