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Chapter 48: Waterpower Mills in Early Butler County, Part One |
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The references to Butler County refer to its present boundaries though the county had not been organized when most of these mills were built. Records have been found on fourteen pioneer mills.
Three mills were on Little Black River: Ball's Mill, Ringo's Mill and Power's Mill. Cane Creek had four mills: one at Roxie Ford, Spradling's Mill, and two mills north of Cane Creek school. Daniel Epps had a mill on Ten Mile Creek. Brown's Mill was on Indian Creek. Spencer's Creek, also known as Mill Creek, had two mills. Three mills were on Black River: Howell's Mill at Keener Spring, Davidson Mill near Wilby and one about midway between Hilliard and Wilby. None of these mills are in existence today. Only two of the names have survived as place names: Ball's Mill and Power's Mill, both on Little Black River. Perhaps there were other waterpower mills which have eluded our search. A mill usually took the name of its owner. A change in ownership brought a change in name, now making it difficult to determine if a reference to a mill is to an already known mill or to a different one. Later we will discuss these early mills with the information available. However, since the mill was so important in pioneer life and has almost disappeared except in a few localties where one has been preserved as a museum piece, we will give some background, construction and operation of an old time mill. Most of the above mills were gristmills.
It was only as man learned to grow grain that he assured himself of an ample supply of food. Grain in a field freed man from the vagaries and uncertainties of the hunt. Dependence on the hunt for food was often either feast or famine and as the number of settlers increased, the living of the hunter became more and more precarious. G.W. Featherstonhaugh, who came through this area in 1834, expressed it this way, "The planter, the only person who always has something to eat."
The pioneer settler in the Midwest could and did grow wheat, but his chief dependence for food was corn. The seeds of fully ripened corn are hard and flinty, unsuitable for human food unless ground or crushed and then cooked. After growing the grain the great problem of the early settler was to get it ground into meal for flour in ample and dependable quantity. Until a mill could be built in a new community, the settlers had to rely on ingenuity and hard work to prepare grain for cooking. We quote from "History of Butler County," by Judge Deem, "For making their meal, the early settlers used "gritters" made from some old metal, such as a tin bucket which was punched full of small holes and then tracted on a board. An ear of corn was then rubbed over the rough surface and the meal caught in some receptacle. In the winter when the corn became too hard, it was boiled until it became soft enough to make meal. This was a slow and laborious process." Grain also could be pounded on a stone or in a hollowed out place in a log or stump. Featherstonhaugh, while in this area, records a conversation he had with the wife of a hunter type settler, or more properly, a squatter. This woman said of her absent hunter husband, "he ain't been hum in a week (and I reckon he's stopt somewhere to help shuck corn: we han't got nuthin in the house but a little corn that I pound as I use it, and a couple of raccoon jist to sarve us till he gits back." (The wilderness hunter chiefly secured corn and other necessities by trading deer skins and bear's oil) The pioneer stories about a full meal barrel are not mere yarns. "Meal in the barrel" was a mark of a provident family. When the pioneer wife told her husband she "was scrapping the bottom of the meal barrel" he knew it was high time to ready some corn for a trip to the mill.
A long, long time ago man found he could eat the seeds of cereal plants, grain to us. Also he found he could make meal out of these seeds by pounding, crushing and grinding them with a stone pestle in a stone mortar. We still can find mortars and pestles on the village sites and campsites of the American Indians. Then, sometime, someplace, an ingenious fellow found he could fit one flat stone above another flat stone and by turning the upper stone on the lower he could grind grain into meal. This was a gristmill, and then and there man had taken another step forward in providing a more adequate supply of food. We do not know when man discovered the principle of the grist mill, but in Deuteronomy, 24:6, is this command, "No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man's life to pledge." Sir Winston S. Churchill, in his great work, "A History Of The English Speaking Peoples," mentions that in the year 500 B. C. the ancient Britons had not learned to grind grain, "with the upper stone revolving on the lower." The earlier gristmills were powered by human muscles, then in various stages, by oxen horses, water, steam, gasoline and electricity.
Butler County was well supplied with streams, which could provide power for a gristmill, but building a mill took time, some capital and lots of hard work. The very earliest settlers here probably took grain to a distant mill in an already settled community. Mr. Louis Houck in "History of Missouri," mentions, "The largest mill of the district (Cape Girardeau) was situated on White Water and belonged to George Frederick Bollinger. This mill was celebrated far and wide. Pioneer settlers on the St. Francois. Black and even White rivers, 75 to 100 miles away, came to this mill to have corn and wheat ground into meal or flour." We think early settlers in this area took grain to Bollinger's Mill.
A mill site had to be accessible to the patrons. It must be at that point the stream must back up water for power and suitable for building a dam to be near a bank or bluff for the Mill House and mill to be above high water. A mill and mill site had a language and terminology peculiar to itself. The dam was the milldam. The pool above the dam was the millpond. The building which housed the mill was the mill house. The wheel which conveyed the power of the falling water was the mill wheel or, simply, the wheel". The outer rim of the wheel was fitted with wide blades against which the water rushed to turn the wheel, Mill wheels were of two types, undershot and overshot. In the undershot the water flowed under the wheel turning the wheel clockwise. The water flowed over the overshot wheel, turning it counterclockwise. The channel or chute which directed the flowing water against the blades of the wheel was the millrace. The portion in the race was the millstream.
The grinding part of the mill was a set or pair of burrs, sometimes spelled buhrs. Also they were called millstone, burrstones or buhrstones. The ones we have seen were of flint or granite. The burrs were enclosed in a housing by which the meal was collected in a receptacle at the bottom of the housing. Toll was the miller's portion of the grain as pay for the grinding. In Missouri the legal toll was one-eighth of the grain for a waterpower mill and one-seventh for a steam power mill, it being considered that the latter was more expensive to operate. Burrs were round, flat and varied in diameter and thickness. A red granite burr recovered from Little Black River at the site of Ball's mill was three feet in diameter, seven and one-half to eight inches thick and weighed about 750 pounds, the upper stone. To provide a grinding surface one side of each burr was deeply scored by furrows cut into the stone. When the stones were mounted in the housing the lower stone was fixed and the grinding surface up. The upper stone rotated and had its grinding surface down. In olden times the lower stone was usually the nether stone.
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