This is some of what’s left of the Blackhawk mill on the Coldwater River a couple of miles outside of Coldwater, Michigan. There used to be a public road that crossed the river where the dam was, but it has reverted to private ownership.

The photo was taken in 1999. It has been several years since I rode there, so I don’t know what it looks like now.

The first Blackhawk mill was called the Pocahontas Mills. But it seems to have had its name changed soon after the Black Hawk war.

There is some old stonework on the site, but no signs of a waterwheel. In Terry S. Reynolds’ 1983 book, “Stronger than a hundred men: a history of the vertical water wheel,” I learned that wooden water wheels would last for 5 or 10 years. To last ten years, they’d need some substantial repairs along the way.

But already by 1832, in parts of the world where iron was available and inexpensive, water wheels were being built with more iron parts and less wood. In fact, some of them were built with tensioned spokes, much like a bicycle wheel. They were usually called suspension water wheels. There is information about them on the web, but I haven’t been able to find an online illustration of one. Reynolds’ book is rich in illustrations, though.

One suspension water wheel that was built in 1827 (i.e. 5 years before the Black Hawk war) in Bakewell, UK, was in use up until 1955. I’ll bet the people in 1827 weren’t imagining such things as 1955 Chevy’s like the one we had when I was a kid.

Another suspension wheel built about the same time in Aryshire, Scotland, was in use for 120 years until it was dismantled in 1947. Reynolds says this one was “found to be true within less than 1/8 inch (3.2 mm). Every few years the spokes had had to be adjusted, but otherwise the wheels had given little trouble.”

Sounds like the quality of bicycle wheels built by Peter White or John Cherry. (I had a lot of trouble with spokes breaking on my wheels until I found those two people — both of them excellent wheelbuilders.)

The suspension wheels are often compared to bicycle wheels, but I wonder if the first builders of bicycle wheels were consciously adapting the technology of water wheels. In any case, a bicycle is now a good way to go visit the sites of old water wheels, wooden or iron.

This photo is from a two-week ride in September 2004. Shabbona Park is on Indian Creek, near Earlville, Illinois. It’s now a place where one can sit at a picnic table to make dinner while watching cows graze near the edge of the creek, or look at the gravestones commemorating those who were killed here in 1832 in the “Indian Creek massacre.” What happened here gave the United States a pretext to do what it was going to do anyway to the Potawatomi people of Indiana and Michigan.

I’m still reading Terry Reynolds’ book about the history of the water wheel. I wasn’t thinking water wheels when I rode to this site, but I should have been. A dam on the creek that lies just over the hill (perhaps a mile or so upstream, though) was a cause of the violence here. A dam would have been for the purpose of a mill, and for that there would have been a water wheel.

There are no water wheels left, but there are millstones. They are not necessarily from 1832, but now I see that putting millstones in that park actually may be part of a connected story about what happened there.

It’s too bad we don’t have more water wheels, though, to remind us of what had once been an important feature of the landscape.

And that naturally brings up the question of whether there are any movies in historical settings that feature water wheels. I can’t think of any. But there some that should have included them. Take Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” for example. The setting is in Russia somewhere in the vicinity of 1400 A.D. The process of heating the iron hot enough to cast into a bell would have required forced air from bellows, and that would almost certainly have required water wheels, if I understand Reynolds correctly. And a water wheel would have been great material for a cinematographer.

Here’s a campaign slogan: Bring back the water wheel, at least into our historical memories!

This is the road past Scott’s Mill Park in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. I often ride within a half mile or so of the park on my way to points to the south or southwest in Indiana or elsewhere. This was a cold day in March 2003 2004 that would have required chemical toewarmers, if I had known about such things back then. My wife was home watching the MSU Spartans men’s basketball team on TV. Despite what I’ve said elsewhere about my intense dislike of TV, I like to watch these games with her. But not at the expense of a good bike ride.

There are mill sites all over my bicycle touring territory, which shouldn’t be surprising given how important water mills were to the economy at one time. Some unanswered questions about the mill at Bridgeton, Indiana led me to the internet and then to a book I’m now reading: “Stronger than a hundred men: a history of the vertical water wheel,” by Terry S. Reynolds (1983).

A lot of what I’ve been reading so far is about water wheels in late Medieval Europe up through the 1600s, though water wheels were used earlier than that, too. Some take-home points for me so far:

• In Europe, it was small streams that were first used for mills. Then people learned how to harness the power of larger rivers. (It had seemed to me that in Michigan the settlers with first dibs quickly grabbed the potential mill sites on the larger rivers; then those who followed looked for the 2nd best sites for mills. But maybe I should re-examine that notion.)
• What we think of as the Industrial Revolution was not a sharp break with the past. It was a continuation of changes that had been going on for several centuries, centered around the use of water wheels.
• It must have been difficult to turn around without seeing a water wheel in late Medieval Europe and in the centuries thereafter. They must have been a lot more prominent part of the landscape (and soundscape) than we see in the movies.
• Some of the earlier mills were operator-owned, but as bigger, more expensive mills came into use, there came more of a separation of capital and labor.
• Some of the earliest mills were not even operated by the owner, but by whosever grain needed to be ground. I don’t know about any mills like that in early Michigan, but people did talk about stump mills that were used on a communal basis. Those were labor-intensive things, and abandoned as soon as water-wheel mills were built.
• In settlement-era Michigan, people talked about grist mills and saw mills. But in Europe, water mills had been used for a lot more than that for some centuries — trip-hammer mills for making clothing, paper, breaking up ore, preparation of olive oil, sugar, dyes, and mortar; running grindstones; drawing wire; boring pipes; stamping coins; and on and on.
• A grinding wheel needs to turn at about 100 rpm for grinding grain. That’s a lot faster than I would have guessed.
• Water mills were also used for making iron. They powered bellows for the final steps of pounding the slag out of it; and later for heating iron hot enough to liquify it and cast it. Interesting to think of water being used to create fire — or at least to make it burn hot enough to make materials for the official Industrial Revolution.

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.”

The stop at Pipeline road was towards the end of my Monday ride (October 8). At the beginning I got mixed up on my way out of Rockville, and ended up at a tourist place known as Billie Creek. It has one of Parke County’s many covered bridges.

But since I was here, I stopped to get a photo before heading back towards Rockville. While doing so, a van with an older couple pulled up. Well, maybe not much older than me. They wanted to know if there were any more bridges than this, and how one went about touring the bridges. I pleaded the ignorance of an outsider, but told them that if they went towards town and stopped at the visitor center on their left, they could get a map that would show them where the bridges were. It’s also the map I was using for bicycling. They seemed pleased to get that much information from me.

Bridgeton was one of my destinations. This is where I had meant first stop to be — not Billie Creek. It’s near the old Isaac McCoy mission school, too.

In fall 2006 I had ridden here and had a chance to ask the owner if he knew where the Isaac McCoy mission had been. He knew about McCoy, but all he could say about the location was that it had been somewhere around there. Here is the Bridgeton Mill web site. But he did know a lot about the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line, which runs just on the other side of Raccoon Creek from the mill.

This year I had done a little more research and had a pretty good idea where McCoy’s mission had been. It had been a few miles to the southwest. But I wanted to stop here first, anyway, to connect my rides together. I like to ride roads I’ve never been on before, but I like them to connect to places I already have been.

There were tourists here, beating the rush of the upcoming Bridge Festival, I suppose. I was minding my camera when a woman commented that I had ridden a long way.

What (I thought)? How did she know where I had come from. Was it obvious that I was from Michigan?

But she was the woman in the van at Billie Creek. She was impressed that I had ridden so far. (It was maybe a little over ten miles from Billie Creek–not all that far–but I don’t mind if people are impressed.)

Next thing she was telling another tourist about me. Turns out this other tourist and her husband had a hobby (obsession?) of visiting covered bridges. I wish I had written down the number she told me, but they had visited far more covered bridges in Pennsylvania (where they were from), Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere than I would ever have guessed existed. I took a photo of her next to the Bridgeton bridge, but we haven’t yet made e-mail contact so I can get a release from her to post it. She told me about a web site that lists all the covered bridges. I don’t think this is the one she meant, but it starts to give the idea.

I hung around Bridgeton for a while before heading on over to what I think is most likely the McCoy mission site.

The Rice Creek dam in Marshall, MI was my 2nd stop after the Ceresco Dam, on a ride to Lenawee County in fall 2005. There is a park here, and a place to make lunch. (I’m posting this now because someone on the Phred mail list is asking about Trangia stoves. What I have here on the bench is the model 27.)

This site was used for water-powered mills already by the time of the Black Hawk war in 1832. The first complete dam may have been built shortly after that. Now there is a plan to remove the dam to restore the stream to its earlier condition, so fish can once again go upstream to spawn.

In a way it’s sad to have to destroy history in order to restore history, but conflicts over dams are nothing new. One such conflict out in Illinois was a part of the Black Hawk war.

The initial war scare had started to die down in Michigan when news came of the Indian Creek massacre. This was an event that took place near present-day Earlville, Illinois. It was the only place where Potawatomi people were involved in the killing. They may have had a personal score to settle over a settler’s refusal to remove a dam that was interfering with fish spawning. I rode there in fall 2004 and have my own photos, but for now I’ll just link to this Wikipedia article.

A militia contingent from Marshall did get called out but seems to have gone no further than Schoolcraft. Marshall is a historic-minded place, and there are a lot of sites here in addition to this dam that are connected to the story of the Black Hawk war. So there will be a lot left even after the dam is torn out.

This photo is from a 3-day ride in mid-October 2004. I was racing the sun to get to the campground on the Pigeon River near Mongo, Indiana before dark. The line of trees along the horizon marks the path of the Pigeon River. Mongo is a town on that river. Mongo is the location of one of the more entertaining scare stories of the Black Hawk war. A practical joke cooked up by the miller and some of his Potawatomi friends almost started a little war of its own.

After this weekend ride was over, I still needed to ride 750 miles to meet my goal of 5200 for that year. I made it, too. One of these days I’ll have to add up this year’s mileage to see how I’m doing. I’m afraid I won’t even have half that many this year.