Millstone

This millstone was pulled out of Raccoon Creek by a backhoe last year. The miller told me about it on my first ride to Bridgeton, in September 2006. Arsonists had burned the covered bridge down, and as I understand it, a backhoe operator found it when doing some cleanup work in the creek afterwards. Or perhaps it was during construction of the replacement bridge.

It is not obvious that it’s a millstone, and it’s not the usual type of millstone. It doesn’t have a hole in the center for an axle. It might seem to be just a roundish, flattish rock, except that part of a machined edge is still intact, and there seems to be some sort of groove on one surface for grain.

In fact, I wonder if it isn’t some kind of edge-runner wheel which would roll vertically on the edge of a horizontal wheel on an axle. Maybe that’s what the miller had been trying to explain to me.

When the Bridge Festival in Parke County is over, maybe I can get him to tell me more about it.

It would be good to learn more about mills and mill technology. The settlers’ reminiscences from the time of the Black Hawk war are full of stories about mills. One of the scenes of fighting in the war took place near a mill site, and may have been payback by Potawatomi people who were upset over what a mill dam had done to fishing. One of the more entertaining war scare stories took place at a mill. Mills, or the lack of them, played a memorable part in surviving the first winter or two. There are stories about mill dressers and the hauling of millstones.

So far I’ve come across a couple of good web sites about old milling technology:

A Theodore R. Hazen has information about mill restoration, including a section on “how to site a mill.” I’ve often wished I knew how to analyze the terrain where remnants of old mill dams are sometimes still visible. I’m amazed at how people used to do it without the benefit of detailed topo maps. A lot of the towns and small cities in the midwest grew up around these mill sites, but there were also a lot of mill sites didn’t work out quite so well.

And here is one from the Peak District in England, which includes not only information about millstones, but also other information about “industrial archaeology.”