Little Old Mills, by Marion Nicholl Rawson, 1935.
The Milner Before there was a mill there was a miller, and it goes without saying that the man who was ambitious enough to start a trade of his own in the wilds of forest and stream, must have been a person of parts. That he was so, is evidenced by some of the memories and traditions which, by some centuries, have outlived the millers themselves. It may be will to become familiar at once with the varied nomenclature of the early miller. He was the "miller" with a "milleress" for a wife; he was the "millward," and often the "millwright," designing and setting up his own mill in all of its parts; he was until the 1700's the "milner" of the "milne," and even the "milliner." In 1651,, when Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was founded, we are told that the title, "Master" was borne by but two persons in the town, the paster, James Keith, and the miller, Samuel Edison. The miller seems to have been the great unafraid among the less daring, and because he was often the only man having a steady income, one which was drawn from a wide circle of neighbors, he became a wealthy person as well. It would be quite remiss, in discussing the old-time miller, not to sing over that fine old song, "The Jolly Miller," which has warped our minds in his favor since we were children. The words, at least, are from the 1700's, written by Isaac Bickerstaff: There was a jolly miller once. Lived on the river Dee; He worked and sang from morn till night, No lark more blithe than he. And this the burden of his song Forever used to be, "I care for nobody, no, not I, If no one cares for me. "I live in my mill, she is to me Like parent, child and wife, I would not change my station For any other life. "No Lawyer, surgeon, doctor, Ever had a groat from me- I care for nobody, no, not I, If no one cares for me. Was it cause or effect? Was he a miller because he was jolly, or jolly because he was a miller? One would incline to the latter reason, since he was host and kingpin of all the social life- barring "Meeting" - for miles around, he had established more than any other man in the countryside, and his work was his friend rather than his scourge, and he generally lived to a good old age, unless, as sometimes happened, he was washed away on the deck of his ship when it went down stream in the rage of a flood. One old miller may not have been too jolly toward the end, for his very own mill deafened him, the "hammer" kind of mill. The miller type of dress is recorded in some Jersey records which describe as follows Miller John Morris, whose grist mill stood on Third River, in the environs of Newark in 1702. "The miller dressed in stout leather breeches, woolen stockings, heavy shoes, woolen shirt, leathern apron, and tall felt hat, all liberally sprinkled with flour dust, -stood by the wheel and judged the fineness of the flour with the time honored testing device - the human thumb." The Acrobatic Miller Recently an old miller of Jacksonville, Florida, fell off of his chair to the sidewalk, leaving active work after scores of years, having produced "water ground" meal for fifty years in a mill made by himself. His whole mill can be set within the four post of an old-fashioned bedstead, or in the space of a carpet loom, and it a collection of tin pipes, croaker sacks, a couple of wooden rollers set with knife blades, a few feet of banding, and a bolting box at the end which looks like a manger covered with wire screening. This is perhaps the smallest gristmill run by water power in the country, and the water power came from the tap of the city water supply. On top of the mill was this sign: "Mill Given Away If Matched," but the sign over the door was more remarkable, being probably the longest mill name on record and this for the smallest mill. "Allen's Patent Purity Process Midget Corn And Wheat Health Good Mill" Miller Allen might be said to carry out the jolly miller idea to perfection. His mill building was a tiny dark store in a narrow street, his bed a nest of burlap bags on the floor behind a curtain at the rear, he ate his food sitting on the sidewalk with his grapes and beans lying along the show-window shelf, and he was always happy. His sorrowing neighbor, from another shop across the way, gave him the following obituary even before he was properly finished: "You should a' come, yesterday, lady; he fell off his chair this morning after living ninety years. The old man could kiss his shoe - did it this morning, done it every morning in spite of his years, and rubbed the sole of his old shoe up and down his cheek to keep in practice. He had a long beard, and he never drank or smoked, he never chewed, always had good habits, always lived with corn and meal, always had dust on his coat. He's practiced his stick for thirty years, and can sleep on water with both legs tied. His stick" The neighbor paused in surprise. "Ain't you never seen him whirling it" It's just a little stick - over there on the shelf. He sets it up on the point of his knife blade, gives it a whirl up in the air and catches it again on the point. When he goes to a circus he gets such a crowd at the gates that they let him in free. Yes, siree he was offered $15,000 to travel round and go to the World's Fair and twirl his stick, but he wouldn't leave his mill or the folks that come with their bags. He wouldn't do no cheap work neither. See that sign" 'Goods sold 10c Up.' He wouldn't waste his time on cheap five-cent orders, he had pride, and he always made 'em pay three cents a pound for grinding." Every Sunday Miller Allen hied him to the park and there whirled his little white chair-rung for the entertainment of the bench-sitters. One cannot call him a representative miller, but a least he was among the few remaining faithful ones who still grind corn meal into grains and not into powder. As to millwrights, the actual constructors of mills, it was said in 1818 that this country abounded in excellent millwrights, "the best, I dare say, in the world."' Patents and Privileges When the first large estates in the South were "patented" by a subject of the English Crown, and "seated" by having a house built upon them, more or less independent villages sprang up where the owner could do about as he liked, and yet there was nearly always some proviso which made it incumbent upon him to start some industry or establish a mill head. It was likewise so in the North when in 1620 Ferdinando Gorges took up his grant on the Piscataqua River in Maine; he had it on condition that he develop water power. He thereupon set to work and constructed a log dam, erected a gristmill and had meal ground for his group.That some water power is still in use, although it might be difficult to find the same old longs within the present dam. During those early years there was much contradiction of policy regarding the establishment of mills. We find bounties being offered to encourage some - and small enough there were - and again refusal on the part of local assemblies for the setting up of others. Some eager millers could not turn a wheel, while others might be most carefully protected from would-be rivals, and at the same time be badly censored and regulated. For instance: in 1639 the settlers at Duxbury, who had previously "ground" at Plymouth, which was easily reached by water, began to plan for a mill of their own. In that year Thomas Hilier and George Pollard agreed at "their own pper cost" to build a "water milne" to grind both "English and Indian." Historians reveal that one hundred and twenty years passed before any rival mill was allowed to operate in that vicinity. A "......deed to a Privilege of Water at the lower falls Etc...." was given to one miller, and this was was "to be taken from the mill-dam or sawmill flume sufficient to carry a fulling mill, napping and shearing machine etc....." As has been said, mills clustered as thick as spatter along out water ways, from the "fall line" stretching from Maine to Georgia - or the head of the coastal plain - wherever a falls poked up its head to give power, to the coast itself, and such works as "privilege" and mill "right" were common even though the mills themselves might be very small. We read the some streams were rapid and afforded several good "mill-seats," and again that there were few "mill privileges," the expressions being used interchangeably. In New Hampshire there is a long, low stretch of pasture land which is called "Way's Flat," and also "The Privilege Lot." because of early mill rights now long forgotten. What Connecticut did in the way of early patents helps us somewhat. In 1640 the General Court offered three pence on every shilling-worth of linen or cotton cloth made in the Colony, and repealed the offer that same year because it worked too well and the taxation to pay the amount was unbearable. In 1641 Samuel Winslow had invented a method of manufacturing salt. "none are to make this article for ten years, except in a manner different from his, provided he set up his works within a year." In 1652, John Clarke was allowed ten shillings for three years from every family who should use his invention for "sawing wood and warming houses at little cost." At the end of that period he was granted the privilege for life. And so it went. Where and How They Grew Up "It is along the borders of streams that men usually seat," said the first surveyor-general of Albemale, in the Carolinas. And where men "seated" or made their homes, they made also their mills. It is Nature's general rule that the offspring shall resemble the forebears, in at least the outstanding points of construction. It is one of the sorrows of those who love the simple, low lines of old mills that their offsprings, the factories, could not more nearly resemble their parents. Whenever the little old mills stood, even although it might be down a steep winding road through trees and thick underbrush, across a ford, around rocks, or through marshes to the tide line, they were the goal of all trails and paths and cart ruts - barring those which led to the Meeting-house - for ox or mule or man. In spite of the fact that "co'lat'ral" did most surely gather about these old centers of industry and trade, in the shape of crooking logs, worn-would wheels, spring casks or a letter of rusted iron, they still archived beauty. This was especially true of brookside mills - they nestled, they grew into their surroundings, they had an open door which beckoned, pulsing life within them, turning wheels, the grinding of stone on stone, and the drip of the melting snow from low eaves in winter and the drench of the warm sun in the summer. There was the lifting and lowering of bags or logs and boards, and the smell of newly ground grain born anew into powder which floated and settled like mist, or the pungent aroma of the heart of a pine newly laid open.They had, perhaps above all else, the touch of the coming and going neighbors for ten or twenty miles around, and the marks of these neighbors as the years went by. Bind weed and magnolia might camp down besides them and creep all about them in the South, or bind weed and elm take them to themselves in the North and East, but even these characteristic touches could not rival the stronger ones woven there by human contacts. We reach these old mills today down some leaf-covered path worn by feet treading there a century or two ago. Acorn shells and puff-balls protest loudly beneath our feet, the jewel-weed holds its flaming gems jealously to cover ancient scars, and the rumble of an old waterfall will often prick our conscious. We find the crumbling wheel or the deep hole in which its turned, or the tottering chimney of a slightly later date. We come upon these hits of the old world as our car careens around some leaf-hung corner of a rough country road, or at a highway's edge, and instinctively reach for the brake. We glimpse them under branches far down the bank of a shaded stream or along some old tidal waterway. With its pole still straggling, or its sail blades pointing crazily to uncharted points, the occasional windmill cuts the horizon, looming large, symbol and creature of the past days when life for the white man was simpler in America, and wind oftener than water was turned to for power. With water or wind, however, it was always the wheel, the perfect circular symbol of Time and Eternity, which struck the keynote of the picture. Through the very nature and needs of a water mill, it grew in loveliness. A mill was, they told us in the earlier days "an engine to cut or grind, to beat up, to comminute." and this last alluring word meant to reduce to powder. Now, if these were the reasons for a mill - making smaller that which was larger - it was necessary to build a great structure which rivaled the treetops or was lined with windows. The first aim was to find some kind of power to relieve man's good right arm of some of its work. That the gently flowing brook should generally have been that power has seemed always one of Mother Nature's choicest jokes, but since it was so, the only thing needed for a mill was some low-lying building hugging a stream or one of its sluice ways. There was seldom a mill which did not in time hang a lean to upon its original frame, shape the new roof so that it combines with the old, and thus grow in grace and slanting lines, a pretty invitation to the elements to do their worst upon it, and there worst was generally their best. Although all of this would have been quite enough, there was still the crowning glory of the water wheel, whose very name was music, not to mention the drowsy drone of its turning. Add then this great, slowly moving wheel to the picture and it would be difficult to find a counterpart for charm. The old German song goes: "In eineen kuhlen grande Da geht ein muhlenrad.........." which is in itself the rhythm and song of an old wooden wheel revolving slowly upon its axis in some shady dell of earth, and in thousands of dells, for within "a cool glade" the mill wheel did "go." To say that "there goes a mill wheel" is to say that there "goes" beauty and song. It is because of this that some of us today are finding the old mills quite as well worth saving as many of the old dwelling houses of the past. Dr. Cross, who wrote the history of the town of Randolph, New Hampshire, was perhaps one of the first to turn an old mill into a home, and as long as he lived, the old wheel stayed in its place at the end of his "mill." Pennsylvania seems to have retained in her old mill groups a vast amount of the quaint beauty of the early days. Perhaps this is due to the fact that she built so many of her early homes and mills with the time-defying field stone. She has many old mill-villages hidden away in unexpected places, groupings which stand out sharply as a note of the past. The miller's house, the mill itself, the outbuildings, quaint bridges of rock and timbers which bring all together , walled sluice ways of rock and ancient dam still reminiscent of the days when they held a natural, unmolested stream in leash, and formed the mill-weir, or "myleware." All of these parts make the suggestive picture of the past, and these little mill villages seem like modern exhibits, under the open sky instead of behind glass. We may say that the woods are full of them, and certainly the brooks were, often four or five brought them together in the same "hollow" or valley to share the one water power. The mills came early and have stayed late, for the winter supply of corn meal or flour for johnnycake or hot flitter (pancake), or the occasional delicate "juncate," had to be laid in at once if the miller and his family were to survive, and although they lived long and prospered, their buildings stayed on for us to know. In many places the millocke is the only remaining sign of settlement. It is a difficult to dispose of the rocks which formed the first walls and leave no mark, and equally hard it is to smooth off the runways, mill trails, races and sluices which were threaded through the ground about the mills. Landmarks they have become of a most enduring nature. The maps of the country tell the story of old mills, in to names which they bear, such as "Clapp's Mill," and "Whitsell's Mill," in North Carolina, patterned of what is found elsewhere through the country. There are towns which bear the name of the miller alone, and we have also "Mill Hollow," " Mill Village," "Mill Landing," and "Cane Creek," "Fur Mill Village," and others similarly millerish. In (Lincester) Maryland, Murray's "Upper Hunting Creek Mill" was responsible for the name which that election district bears. Mill streams were often chosen as the boundary line between towns or villages, for the most important business center of the whole countryside had to be reckoned with in all town development. The Mill is the Club There were but two social centers in pioneer life, and so they old saying grew, "To Mill or to Meetin," which covered the whole gamut of social possibilities. When a grist miller ground grain for the surrounding neighborhood, even although that neighborhood might have a radius of ten miles, his mill was a "custom mill;" when he sent his grain off to a distance, for export, his mill became a "merchant" mill. But whatever, its type and breadth of scope, "the mill" was the social center of the frontier for many decades, and even unto today. It mattered not whether it fulled cloth or sawed wood, ground corn or hair-powder, it had its own atmosphere of sociability. It has it today. It might contain one or two backless chairs, but there were always bags or "lumber" of some sort upon which to drape the human figger. That these human figgers needed just such a get-together place, goes without saying. The mill was the club. Here the henpecked and the wife beaters could all meet and relive their minds and regain their self-respect if it had been tottering. Here the local statesman and the religious ranters could find an audience. Here the farmer could ascertain how his neighbors' crops were comin' on in the drought, what chance there was of a schoolmaster being brought into the settlement, whose wife was ailing and whose was feeling uncommon stout and unusual smart. It was good to get into a dark corner of the sociable old mill with a neighbor on a winter's day - those who lived near by as soon as the chores were done in the morning, and those who lived "out" by early noon-mark. Few windows, with shutters on the inside, over hanging trees which love a mill, and humans sitting about, the yellow mist of the meal on all sides and making heavy the cobwebs up above, all of these things made the dusty mill a toneful, colorful haven where faces peered dimly from the shadowed recesses and man might better reveal his heart than in the summer days of too bright a sun. To relieve this dusk, the miller had fats from the miller's house were gathered, and into which a large piece of cloth was bundled, its ends brought together in a hardy tied know at the top, for a wick. No mill was complete without its great tomcat or terrier, and no mill without the necessary food for rats and mice, and whatever gain was ground did these little friends gnaw deeply into the peace and profit of the miller. The miller's perfect dream was of a stack of tow sacks, or gunny sacks, or croaker sackers, or burlap bags, without a single hole. When the sun went down and evening walked softly across the treetops and rough stump cart ruts, and the farmer had reached home again with news for a whole week's talk, and the miller has stopped the wheel and set a stake against the door, the mill became a trysting place for love. The old wheel now hung sleeping in the mill fleam or stream, for Time had stopped for the mill, and so at this hour of soft green dusk and later stars, it became the theatre of the settlement whereon romance was enacted, far from eavesdroppers. One never thinks of the modern factory, which came into name after the war of 1812, as a helpment to beckon the love-awakened, while the millocke did its night-shift duty along these very lines. In those days Nature had been so little disturbed that the place of the day's hard work was as lovely as the rose-tinted arbors of love. Another side of the simple old mills was that which showed them as ideal schools and even nurseries. No matter how busy or how given over to its work the mill might be, it was always just a home affair, with the miller's house and family at the end of the path. there his boys learned not only how to work, but those simple laws of mechanics upon which all of millering was based whether by hand or power, and here they developed in practice wisdom and knowledge, asking questions, taking a hand in the different jobs, often having a hard one for their very own. It was in their father's mill or the mill of some other boy's father, that they watched men at their trading, saw them leave and arrive with the product of their own hands, knew that that and that only would keep a person alive, having learned many things which no school could teach, along with their ABC's. After the earliest centuries has passed and mills needed more than one pair of hands in the building, they began their social activities even before the first stone was set or the first timber was laid. Such was the case of the "Old Mill" which still stands between Morristown and Bernardsville and not far from Jockey Hollow in New Jersey. Its builder, Ferdinand Van Doren, was a young man owning an old mill built in 1768. In the early 1840's he aspired beyond a red wooden structure a new mill until he had the necessary time. One day a tramp came ambling though the valley asking first for food and lodging and then for work. Here was the miller's chance. The tramp remained all winter and for bed, board and tobacco dug the great hole for the new mill. In the spring, Van Doren invited his neighbors far and near to a "stone frolic" - the "bee" of New England. The nearest available rocks were a mile away in the hedgerows of a neighbor's fields, and several thousand loads were hauled by oxen, mules and horses, which wallowed through the mud in an endless procession. When enough rocks had been hauled to build a four-story and open arched basement, the mason was engaged at seventy-five cents a day and his helpers for fifty. At the end of the first year of grinding, the $5,000 which the mill had cost its owner, was safely back in his stocking for the mill had "paid for itself." These Jersey "frolics" were a time of immense and glad companionship, a time of hard work made joyous through neighborly contact. Those days were fill of vitality and courage, in spite of the yarns of those moderns who think of them as horrors of limitation, narrow-mindedness, and much work with no fun. They might be described, in comparison with today, through the old-fashioned game of "Jack stones," which is older than man can remember. Originally "Jack stones" was played with seven stones, any smooth rounded ones which could be picked up in the gravel. One of them was to be tossed into the air, while from the door rock or floor, the player must pick up, first one stone at a time, and then two, three, and four, and so on, it sets, and be ready after each pick-up[ to catch the king stone before it hit the ground. Today we have the game made characteristically modern. Six little metal forms with protruding points to make gathering easier, are picked up according to the old system, but instead of a seventh stone to throw, a nice little rubber ball is used, easy to throw, easy to catch - and oh, modern ease - legitimately caught, not before it hits the earth, but upon the bounce. It is taking things on the first or second bounce which differentiates us from out ancestors, who were there for the first catch and the consequent inside knowledge. Report to London Our old mills had a long span of life in America in their primitive forms. They were like a tall tree in a forest which keeps on growing down below where the work must be done, swaying back and forth whenever a wind in the top branches signals of a change in the atmosphere, but, as far as the world is concerned, seen only as an unrecognizable part of a soft green skyline. Benjamin Franklin in London, in 1768, had the best interests of his son, William - Governor of New Jersey - in mind, when he took his pen in hand to send him a fatherly tip suggested by the reading of a detailed report of the milling business in America, as made out by a representative from England who had been investigating the manufactures of the Colonies. It was quite necessary that the Crown should know how strong we were growing in commercial ways. William was not the man his father was, and seems to have been contented to let the Colony gae its own gait. Benjamin writes, in substance: -There are no manufactures of any importance. -Massachusetts has a little coarse woolen for her own family wear. -Glass and linen tried and failed. -Rhode Island and New York, much the same. -Pennsylvania has tried a linen manufactory, but it is dropped, it being cheaper to import. Glasshouse in Lancaster County, but makes only a little coarse ware for the country neighbors. -Maryland is clothed all with England manufactures. -Virginia, same except some families spin a little cotton of their own growing. -South Carolina and Georgia, none. -All speak of the dearness of labor what makes manufactures impractical. -Only the Governor of North Carolina parades with a large manufacture of his country that may be useful to Britain, of pines boards, they having fifty sawmills on one river. -Better send you own account before meeting of next Parliament. You have only to report a glasshouse for coarse window glass and bottles and some domestic manufactures of linen and woolen for family use, which do not half clothe the inhabitants, all the finer goods coming from England and the like......... -These accounts are very satisfactory here, and induce the Parliament to despise and take no notice of the Boston resolutions. In addition to its value as a resume of industries of the country, at least as epitomized by an outlander, this letter gives mute testimony to Franklin's efforts to keep his son's affairs in order, a rather troublesome and, finally, impossible task. Tolls For having naturally, or growing, his powers as a chafferer, or bargainer, the early miller seems to have been famous, and yet since he was often the only man in the neighborhood who had real money to his credit there may have been some sour grapes behind his reputation. Any man who had push enough to start a mill in a wild country, and put brains and money into his scheme, would naturally in time acquire substance. Still, even though price-fixing and production-control were in vogue in our past, beginning at once in the new country, the millers are said to have found ways to better their condition without open disregard of law. The "toll" for grinding at Plymouth for the first tow years was a "pottle" or four quarts out of each bushel ground, and later two pottles were kept. At Ipswich, one sixth of the grain ground went to the miller's bin, this was in 1635. Virginia in 1663 ordered one-sixth of the "Indian" as toll, while, in 1899, Vermonters thought that one fourteenth was fair pay. An ancient saw says: Every honest miller has a golden thumb." From Vermont comes this echo: "It has been scandalously stated that a miller's right hand grew into a peculiar bent shape from scooping too low in the grain." Since Vermont itself thought this scandalous, we will skip it, for most millers' hands seem to be naturally shaped, but we may remember, but we may remember, with no scandal, her saying: You can never tell upon whose grain the miller's pig was fattened." One prerequisite of the miller which helped his money-bags, was the "mill ring" or the meal which remained about the millstones after the grinding was done. The farmer must keep his hands off this precious dust, for even dust had its value when added more to more. Toll was also taken of sawn boards at a sawmill. For "bill stuff" or boards brought outright and not home-cut, "millstone silver" was paid if there were no other commodity which could be bartered. "Want I should set it down or will you settle for it?" the miller would ask a farmer. If there were no "hard money" available, as milling years wore on, the farmer's accounts had to be "booked" or a "score made on the blotter," the blotter being the mill door or wall or perhaps on a special part of the floor, and the writing implement a piece of chalk, a slab of slate or a sharp nail which was handy. One miller who kept his accounts in a leisurely way would sometimes find himself short a few bags of shorts or a few feet of lumber. His method was to send bills for it to his different regulars, who in turn would drive up to the mill to deny the charge. The miller would laugh it off and say, "I didn't cal'late it was you, all along." These methods were not conducive to respect for his honesty, particularly when he generally found he had used the lumber himself for some odd job, and stored the shorts in some safe place against the rats. The farmers held no real ill will but put it down to "Caleb's some queer that a'way." A still unsolved mystery lies in the note from Plymouth Colony, in 1648, when "a miller was charged with using an unsealed toll-dish," which would make one think that each mill had its mite box where the tolls were paid according to conscience instead of according to regular rates prescribed by the Colony authorities, as we have already seen was done. Millering was then certainly a "trade" as well as wheelwrighting or tinkering, for one man traded off his surplus for the other man's surplus, which is all there is to trading or business, after all. Today because we carry our "charge" in our pocketbooks, we forget that we are simply trading in the old way, whenever we make a purchase. In the country sections we still "go to the Street to trade," whether we carry pennies or eggs. What trading really means is to "swap." "To draw water to one's mill," means to seize advantages; and another saw, "To go through the mill," means to have been through a process of thorough overhauling, often painful, or in other words, to have "stood a whole lot." "It's all grist that comes to his mill."
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