ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997 TAG: 9703120093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CALLAWAY
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON THE ROANOKE TIMES
Outside this tiny community, population 2,000, a small demolition crew has removed an abandoned grist mill where folks in western Franklin County traded goods and conversation for more than 100 years.
The mill now belongs to Explore Park of Roanoke County, where historians plan to restore it to operation in about a year.
The Sloan family mill on Turner Creek Road was one of dozens in Franklin County that at one time used water power to grind grain for local residents. From its ruins, restorers can create a working mill for demonstration to park visitors. Explore also hopes to sell the grain.
It's going to be a spectacle worth seeing, predicted Louise Richardson, 67, whose father last operated the mill more than 50 years ago. "I know what it's about, but there are a lot of people that have never seen this type of thing in operation."
Members of the Esom Sloan family of Franklin County built the mill about 1885. Richardson's father, Posey Jones, bought it in 1934.
When she was a girl, Richardson spent many of her free afternoons playing there as her father worked.
"The water, it was provided by a creek, you know. It'd come out of the mountain and we had a wooden mill race that brought it into the wheel, that made the wheel go. All the controls, they was iron," she said. No electricity was used.
The first time she actually helped operate the mill, at age 8 or 10, she stood on a platform in the mill house and pulled down a small wooden lever. That action freed the water outside in the race, an elevated, open-top, wooden canal.
The water spilled onto an exterior 20-foot-tall wheel. The big wheel's revolutions turned large, flat and round millstones inside the mill building. The mill had two pairs of stones and the
miller used one for corn and the other for wheat, rye flour and oat flour.
While many people today think a mill's stones rubbed together, in reality, "the stones don't ever touch," instructed Theodore R. Hazen, Explore Park's project leader and a milling expert who also runs Pond Lily Restorations of Roanoke.
The grain passed into a small clearance between the stones, was caught in grooves in the stones' facing surfaces and sheared into pieces.
"Most people have never seen mills," Hazen said. But their place in history is important. "Towns grew up around mills. That's why you have so many towns with the word 'mill' in it."
Often, the first roads in an area led to its mills, which also is why road names derived from the word 'mill' are common.
Back then, most everybody ate something made from mill-ground grain every day, Hazen said. A family could grow or buy grain and visit the nearest little country mill, often on horseback. The miller took a portion of the ground product as his pay.
The Sloan mill property was the site of a small store as well, where the various millers sold the grain they took in and did not use.
Richardson's father got out of milling in the late 1940s because he could make a better living raising cattle. The mill and its upkeep were abandoned, setting in motion its slow decay. "First the wheel goes. It began to rot away," Richardson said.
When commercially prepared meals and flours became available in stores in the 1950s and 1960s, the area's mills went out of business. The flour and meal sold in stores today is ground by metal rollers.
Over the years, the Sloan mill withered beside the road as title to the property continued to change hands.
On a chilly morning this January, men in yellow hard hats dismembered her. The boards went into a pile; the millstones, a small barrel, homemade bolts and other artifacts already had been carted away. One item found was part of an old advertisement for Wrigley Spearmint gum. But there were other, more curious, discoveries.
"I reached up and pulled a board off and there was this bottle behind it," said Perry Forbes, a member of Explore Park's dismantling crew. The bottle, marked with a doctor's name and "N.Y.," contained a black liquid. Was it liniment? Booze? No one knows yet, though tests may be done to identify the substance.
"What was interesting about it is where we found it - it was tucked away," said Alan McGrady of Explore Park.
When restored, the mill will contain about 40 percent original material. Crews recovered most of its ax-split foundation stones in hopes many can be reused as well. Crews have the soapstone pieces of the mill's fireplace. Everything is at the park now, awaiting reassembly, to begin later this year.
"I just got to sort of put all the pieces back together," Hazen said.
The Horace Fralin charitable trust paid the $1,000 purchase price for the mill and has made available up to $134,000 for restoration, related work and new materials. Crews will build a small pond and feed pipe from the Roanoke River to serve as the mill's source of water. The mill will sit in what is now a woody area about halfway between the Blue Ridge Settlement and the river.
Restorers hope to grind their first bag of meal at Explore Park in April 1998.
As for Richardson, she took with her a fondness for corn meal baking. Today, she buys her meal at Kroger or Wal-Mart and bakes something each week. Of meal made the old way or the modern way, "both is good," she said, "but somehow I guess it probably tasted better back then."
Whatever its success as an Explore Park attraction, the mill already
LENGTH: Long : 107 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. Workers dismantle theby CNBmill (above), which is a slow process because each part must be
given a name and number to identify it when the mill is rebuilt at
Explore Park. 2. A peek through a window (left) shows that the old
gea connected to the shaft of the water wheel is still
intact. 3. Ted Hazen is overseeing the mill restoration project for
Explore. color.