Ye Olden Time Mills
How Our Great Grandmothers Got Their Breadstuffs
Article taken from The Edwardsville Intelligence, January 4, 1898
In 1785 four families from Redstone, Pa., floated down the Ohio and attempted to form a settlement where the city of Portsmouth now stands. Mooring their boat under the high bank of the river, they began to clear away the forests and plant seeds.
Soon after landing the four men who were the heads of the four families, leaving their wives and children, set out to explore the Scioto valley, the wonders of which they had heard from whites who had traversed it while in Indian captivity. There is no record, so far as can be learned, of the name of any of the men save that of Peter Patrick.
They encamped opposite Piketon, and Patrick cut his initials on a tree. At night, as they lay be their campfire, they were attacked by a party of Indians and two of their number killed. Patrick and his companion fled, leaving the dead behind, and made their way in the direction of the Ohio river, which they struck at the mouth of the Little Scioto just as some white men were passing down in a pirogue. Hailing them, they asked to be taken aboard.
They were brought to the little settlement, where a scene of agonizing grief was enacted. Knowing that the Indians would soon attack them, they gathered up all their movables and fled to Lime-stone now Maysville, Ky., and the original settlement of Portsmouth was abandoned.
In an old paper recently come to light, written by Hon. George Corwin, once a prominent citizen of Portsmouth, in its early days, the milling facilities at the divide of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are graphically described. Speaking of the first mill he ever saw, he says:
"It was at Maysville, Ky. It was made of timber, stone and buffalo hides. I am not sure there was any iron about it . It came not wishing the scope of things worshiped in idolatry, for it was like nothing else but itself, neither on the earth nor in the patent office. It was to grind corn into meal to make mush and johnny cake.
"It was constructed of round logs set in the ground to make them stand up. Over them a roof of bark, under which was an upright shaft turning on a wooden gudgeon or pivot. Over the horses for it was a horse mill-extended arms from the uprights shaft, and in these were holes like you sometimes see in the arms of blades or swifts on which the weavers put skeins of yarn to wind.
"In these holes were pins, over or around which was thrown a long buffalo tug, or rope, made by cutting hides round and round into long strips and twisting them. The different holes in the arms were for the purpose of tightening this tug, or band. from these arms the tug extended to and around the trundle to which the running stone was attached, and to prevent it slipping the tug crossed between the long arms and the trundle, which was a short log with a groove cut around it. More effectually to prevent slipping a bucket of tar was kept ready to daub it. Still it was with great difficulty that the mill could be kept going, even when the horses moved, and it was sure to stop when they did.
"It required a man like Job to tend to this mill, but the miller was not one of that temperament. He always seemed to doubt or distrust the performance of the machine and to be on the rollout for some disaster or disappointment.
"I was once present when he got in a team of fractious horses, which broke the tug and otherwise deranged the parts of his mill, which made him exclaim, among other hard words, that such horses were 'enough to drive hogs out of satan.' After some time spent in repairs-for damages were apparently as easily repaired as the parts were liable to go out of order-our miller was again making headway with his grinding operation."
The second mill recalled to the writer's mind one of the former great institutions of Cincinnati, the Western museum. He says:
"The other mill I saw in the year 1797 on the Scioto river. It was built on two large dugouts, or canoes, with a wheel placed between them. This wheel, after being moved up or down, as the settlers at different stations needed its assistance in mashing corn, was tied to a tree in a rapid current, which, running against a wheel between the canoes, turned the stones above under a kind of umbrella made of bark.
"At a distance it had the appearance of a crane flying up the river. It made a sound, for the want of grease, like the creaking of a wooden cart. Were such a thing at this day in the Western museum it would draw more custom to it than anything there.
"Notwithstanding all these properties in the mill and the difficulty in tending it the miller, like many of his occupation even at this day, was accused of taking more than is share of corn. The complaints were at first surmises, then whispers, afterward common talk and at last so loud as to attract the miller's attention. To clear himself of this slander he told his customers that his mill ground so slow that he could no afford to waste it; that his practice was to throw up a grist in the morning and go about other business; that through the day the crows, blackbirds and squirrels would come in for their share, which he was not bound to make up, and if they didn't like his way doing business they might go to the next mill, if they could find it."
So it would appear that they had not only funny mills, but funny millers as well, in ye olden time.