Little Old Mills, by Marion Nicholl Rawson, 1935.
"I loved the dark round of the dripping wheel."
Wherefore? WHY are we willing and eager to leave a good highway and travel a rutty wood road for the scant glimpse of an old mill wheel still in place on the outside of a tumbling mill? Probably because wheels have always been a lure to the eye and because a lovely old moss-covered mill wheel cannot be beaten for grace and artistic line. A wheel has a good deal more inwardness than we apt to give it credit for having - an outwardness, too. Once the wheel was an instrument of torture upon which men were broken, but that was not the fault of the wheel, rather a compliment to it- for man came early to trusting to the wheel for an amazing versatility. One of the far-away definitions of it called it "for tortures and spinning," two needs of primitive man. Noah Webster called it a rotating disk or a circular frame, and it is as the rotating disk that we should think of the wheel in mist of its early usefulness, rather than as the circular frame, that more slender affair with a hub, radiating spokes and a felloe rolling over the ground to convey some vehicle of travel. A disk was a flat circular plate, and many of the wheels which convey power in our little old mills were just that, circular plates crudely made of heavy timbers and mortised together in many nicely fitting angles. A wheel was also made of two flat disks of wood joined together at the rims with a broad circumference of wooden cross pins, or a tyre of iron. Perhaps oftenest the wheel was nothing more than the cross-section of a great tree, made to roll upon its bark surfaces. Old Mills seem to have had a place for nearly every kind of wheel. Within, we have already seen them heavily cogged or pegged, engaging each other from the turning of their shafts. Out of doors was the real "mill wheel," or water wheel, or paddle wheel. These wheels were and still are really two immense wheels on the same shaft, with spokes of heavy flat boards mortised to fit close together at the hub and joined together at the rim by the paddles, or floats, or pallettes, or vanes of heavy wood, which make an endless revolving stairway, although some of the wheels had compartments on each float to better catch the water. There was no established place where one might look for the wheel in an old mill, for it was located wherever the dam, the flume, the channel rocks or the miller chose to place it. It might be hidden under the mill in a deep pit; or exposed to the weather on the outer wall running flush with the earth's surface in a shallow waterway; it might be at one side of the mill turning in a deep gloom, at the rear under a penthouse, down within a stone pit at one end, on a bank with the mill built above it, or wherever expediency and natural lay of the land and flow of water dictated. The wheel pit was a danger hole, for a man falling into it while the wheel was turning had little chance of escape, and some millers were actually drowned in their own mills when some one opened the gate at the wrong time. The old "Red Mill," still standing at Arcola, New Jersey, has two killings in its records. The first was when, before the Revolutionary War, an Indian came to murder the miller and was himself killed by the monstrous water wheel; in 1924 a Negro boy who wanted a place to rest his bones, chose one of the broad paddles of the old wheel and all unconsciously stated it going. Before he could recover himself the next great paddle had come around and struck him in the head. Such an accident might have happened at any time during the long period of time when it was impossible to lock the wheel. The hub or axle of the water wheel was called the shaft, and it was generally a naked tree-trunk of perhaps a two-foot diameter. So that the constant turning should not wear the shaft too easily, its ends were shod with iron. This iron was the "gudgeon," a word which seems to have been used rather indiscriminately, wherever a bit of iron or wood became a support, of part of a rod. This particular gudgeon was most interesting, consisting of two heavy bands of iron encircling four iron leaves set at an angle, which protruded from a central iron axis. To make it fast upon the wooden shaft, the end of the shaft had first to be bored and then cut across from edge to edge with a sharp chisel to make properly shaped recesses into which the gudgeon was made fast with iron wedges, and keys of white oak. Wheel Types The OVERSHOT wheel requires a dam, and its turned by the weight of the water which falls upon it from farther up. Its paddles are made of planks formed into separate chambers, or "buckets" slanting toward the stream. These are sometimes called "bucket wheels," One old miller reckoned out the following for the overshot wheel: "The velocity allowed the water should be three to five feet a second, about twenty-four buckets to a ten-foot wheel, and about fifty-six buckets to a twenty-foot wheel." He found also that that these wheels utilized about seventy-five per cent of the energy of a stream. The flouring mill built at New London, Connecticut, about the middle of the 1600's, and still standing, is an example of an overshot wheel mill, with its dam above it and water coming to it through a wooden trough or pen stock. The UNDERSHOT wheel us used either in a running stream or close to a falls, where the floodgate is at the bottom of the dam. Such a wheel will turn in very shallow water, although it may measure from twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter and have paddles from one to two feet wide. The distance between the paddles is equal to their width, and as they increase in number the energy is increased. The power of this wheel is speed and force rather than weight, and is received directly against the lower side of the flat blade. Examples of the undershot well are at Murray's Mill on Upper Hunting Creek, (Linchester) Maryland, built in 1681 and still standing, and the old tide mill at Popular Grove, (Mathews County) Virginia, remains of which are still to be seen. The undershot wheel was not a real success, although often used, since it caught not more than thirty per cent of the stream's energy. The BREAST wheel, instead of receiving water from below or above, takes it on its breast or forward part, and its known as a high, or low breast wheel according to whether the water came above or below its center. This wheel uses sixty-five per cent of the stream's energy because it is less loaded with water and therefore revolves more easily. Its floats are close together and one-fourth of its rim turns close to the channel to catch the weight and momentum of the falls which may be from four to ten feet high. The SUSPENDED or TIDE wheel is not quite so large as the others, usually measuring not over fifteen feet in diameter, and never having more than two dozen blades. The PITCH-BACK wheel is similar to a high breast wheel but differing from other wheels in its refusal to follow the hands of the clock, and going the other way round. Water flowing to it comes through a pen stock, passing through a gate and strikes the wheel back of upper center of the circumference, Jacob Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, made himself such a wheel which measures thirty feet across. The FLOAT wheel has the look of great antiquity than the others, and is among the simplest of all the wheels. It calls for no dam or impounding supply of water but turns in any stream which flows against crude paddles. The wheel proper is not as large as the other types, but since the great plank paddles or floats are very broad and very long, extending out like great fans, the wheel attains a considerable size. The FLUTTER wheel is used where there is a large supply of water, and may be adopted to any head above six feet by making glow and broad. It will give one hundred or more revolutions or strokes to the saw in a single minute. The "TUB" mill is called the simplest of all the types and is suited to those places where water runs to waste the whole year round. It has no place in a stream which has its dry seasons. Although it is called the cheapest of all the mills, it must have an eight-foot fall. It is described in detail as follows" "The tub mill has a horizontal water wheel, which is acted upon by percussion of the water. The shaft is vertical, carrying the stone on top of it, and serves in place of a spindle. The lower end of the shaft is set in a step fixed in a bridge tree, by which the stone is raised and lowered, as by the bridge tree of other mills. The water is shot on the upper side of the wheel in the direction of the tangent, the circumference being fitted with cogs. The wheel runs in a hoop like a millstone hoop, projecting so far above the wheel as to prevent the water from shooting over it, and whirls above it until it strikes the buckets........" Water shot in a deep, drives a column, nine inches wide and eighteen inches deep, drives a five-foot stone from an eight-foot head. Levi Hicks had a tub mill on Spruce Creek, Pennsylvania, in 1778, and this is specially remembered because he was murdered at his mill by Indians and thus granted immortal fame. The horizontal position of the simple "tub" introduces us to the thought of the TURBINE wheel, which was finally successful in driving our classic open-air paddle wheels into discard. "Turbine" means to whirl or spin, and that is what the turbine wheel does with its periphery fitted with a series of curved floats. Turbines used the horizontal shaft until 1843 when the vertical ones came into use. Then "came the turbine horizontally submerged, with curved vertical buckets or floats, revolving around a fixed horizontal disk, a common axis running through wheel and disk, There was no friction, less space was required. The action was steady. It was below the ice, and had a greater energy." About 1700 a Scotshman by the name of Barker thought out a new plan for a mill wheel. He worked on the principle that water flowing quickly from a small opening will always tend to act with a back kick, turning the object from which it passes, unless that be firmly fastened. "Barker's Mill" is therefore called the beginning of the American turbine idea, and it was not until 1844 that Uriah A. Boyden working for improvements on the earlier French idea of Fourneyron, gave us the first American turbine wheel. Hydraulic turbines were entirely enclosed and took the water in a column into their interior from above the dam. In time there arrived the "forward flow" and the "inward flow" turbines. An old mill at Bow, New Hampshire - where incidentally beauty runs wild - had an early tub wheel, and after this was worn out, and its three-ply rim and inner curved teeth been tossed into the bushes, it was replaced with a pair of SPIRAL wheels, the next step ahead in that vicinity. These new wheels worked at a high speed with a low head of water, and were turned by the water's twisting through the spirals and affording the desired kick. The ROSE wheel was in use about the middle of the 1800's and was similarly of the "impulse type" and moved by a double jet of water. Thus we see the full flow of water against the vertical wheel making way for the small stream of water playing upon the horizontal wheel. With all the advantages of the later type it is not surprising that the old paddle whey, which needed more water and yet could not take full advantage of it, was doomed to disappear from many mills. One more point against the old paddle wheel was that it could be sued only in a small mill while the turbine had unlimited possibilities of multiplication under the same roof. It would, however, be a mistake to think that "the dark round of the dripping wheel" was no longer seen or heard in the land, for long after the turbine came, the old style of wheel was used in all parts of the settled areas, and can today be found making its slow, rhythmic revolutions through the flowing streams. The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right. Disraeli: Lothair
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