Thomas K. Ford

“ If not much is now known about milling within the confines of Williamsburg itself, a great deal can be related of milling in the larger expanse of the Virginia colony. For despite the late start of merchant milling in the tobacco colonies, the grinding of grain for export had become big business by the time of the Revolution. In 1766 Governor Fauquier noted in a report to the Board of Trade (albeit almost as an afterthought) that the Virginians “daily set up mills to grind their wheat into flour for exportation.” ”

“ If the hopper ran empty of grain, the friction of the stones rubbing against one another could generate enough heat for combustion. So could the friction of the brake if it were used continuously in a strong wind. In either event, a building made entirely of wood and open to every breeze burned readily, and more windmills probably fell victim to fire and storm than to old age. Similarly, its height and exposed position made the windmill an attractive target for lightning.
The sail wheel of the Williamsburg mill has a diameter of fifty-two feet—about average for a small post mill of this type. ”

“ Just inside the front wall of the mill the windshaft rests in a metal bearing, and next to it is the large gear wheel, known as the “brake wheel,” that can be seen when one looks up through the trap door from the mill’s little back platform. The platform, incidentally, was not unusual in post mills, although it was often a convenience added after the mill was built and on which the miller could enjoy a pipe and a moment of repose while the mill ground merrily away. ”

“ A substitute, Joseph Davenport by name, was lured from Pennsylvania but turned out to be an inferior miller and as slothful as Roberts had been unreliable. Even so, Washington tolerated him until Davenport’s death in 1796. His successor, Callahan, was a competent miller but again far from industrious, and demanded higher wages than the mill could support. In desperation, Washington hunted up Roberts and offered to rehire him on condition of “a solemn and fixed determination to refrain from liquor.” ”

“ A mill scheduled to be built near Robert Carter’s on Nomini Creek—too near, he thought—would be the twenty-fourth within twelve miles on the Virginia side of the Potomac, an area that included no towns.
Carter’s “new mill,” completed in 1773, had a capacity of 25,000 bushels a year and cost him £1,450 in materials and wages. Carter also built in connection with the mill a bake house, the two ovens of which would bake one hundred pounds of flour at each heating. And he hired a cooper to “get up 10 good flower caskes per day” at an annual salary of £30. ”

“ The primary machinery of the mill consists of sails, stones, and the necessary shafts and gearwheels to transmit power from the sails to the stones. In addition, there are devices for braking the sails, for hoisting bags of grain from the ground to the upper or “stone floor,” for feeding grain at the proper speed to the stones, for warning the miller when the supply of grain in the hopper is getting low, for adjusting the distance between stones, and for separating the meal from the bran. ”

“ THE OLD MILL STREAM OF HISTORY
For uncounted generations in every pre-mechanical civilization grain has been ground in a variety of one-woman-power devices. Pounding with mortar and pestle was one of the earliest and is still the crudest of these devices. The saddlestone-metate device, still to be seen in some areas of Central and South America, substituted a rolling, sliding motion to the upper stone that rubbed and sheared the grain. ”

“ Around its outer edge is the brake band—of bent hickory—that can stop the sails and hold them at any position when the long, heavy brake lever is lowered. As an emergency aid in slowing down the sails in a strong wind, the stones can be choked with grain, thus making them harder to turn. The mill can also be operated with partially furled sails.
The stones themselves consist of the lower or “bed stone,” which does not move, and the upper or “runner stone,” which turns at a little more than five times the rate of the sails. ”

“ All the known watermills lay outside the corporate limits of the city. The nearest, apparently, was a paper mill built by William Parks, founder of the Virginia Gazette, and described by him as “The first Mill of the Kind, that 14 ever was erected in this Colony.” It stood about a half-mile south of town on a stream that is known to this day as “Paper Mill Creek.”
When he married the rich Widow Custis, George Washington became the owner of two plantations close to Williamsburg and a water grist mill not three miles from the town. ”

“ Since few but the very largest plantations could keep a mill busy at grinding home-grown grain, most plantation mills also did custom grinding for nearby farmers. A mill formerly owned by John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses, collected enough toll in this fashion to feed a “family” of nearly sixty persons, plus several horses.
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Two tower mills and three post mills can be seen on this map, redrawn from a “Sketch of the East end of the Peninsula Where on is Hampton.” On the same peninsula, thirty miles to the northwest, lies Williamsburg. ”

“ In the tower mill, almost the whole mill became a firm structure. Only the cap, holding the sails and their axle, needed to be turned to face the wind. Turning this cap was far easier than turning the whole body of a post mill. Small to start with, tower mills became quite large when mechanical means were developed to adjust sail area. The tallest English tower mills were more than one hundred feet high at the hub of the sails, with sweeps that reached out as much as forty feet. ”

“ This apparently slow and majestic rate is deceptive; for at twenty rpm the tips of the sails travel at a linear speed of 3,266 feet a minute or about thirty-seven miles an hour! An operating windmill is something to stay well clear of, as Don Quixote 27 and uncounted innocently grazing cows and sheep have discovered to their sorrow.
The four arms are fixed into the hub of the massive “windshaft.” This is the main horizontal axle that brings the power of the turning sails into the mill. ”

“ To relieve his tired horse of the burden, he carried the sack of grain on his own back! Note that the mill was a post mill and that it was slightly head sick.
PUTTING THE WIND TO WORK
A post mill, as its name suggests, perches somewhat like a flagpole-sitter on the end of a sturdy post held upright by a timber framework. The Laws of Oleron, a breezily worded maritime code adopted in England about 1314, stated that “some windmills are altogether held above ground, and have a high ladder; some have their foot in the ground, being, as people say, well affixed.” ”

“ Despite Byrd’s example, commercial or “merchant” milling, as it was known, gained little headway in the colony until the next century was two-thirds over. Then, when wheat became important to the tobacco growers as a second export crop, quite a few planters added a second pair of stones to their mills and began shipping barrels of flour along with hogsheads of tobacco. The additions were usually buhr or “burr” stones from France, preferred for high-quality grinding because their structure included sharp-edged quartz cavities. ”

“ So for all its clumsiness in appearance and lumbering clatter in operation, the windmill is an extremely precise mechanism at the point where precision counts.
The stone dresser often steadied his forearm on a sack of meal as he worked. His hands were constantly bombarded with bits of stone and slivers of metal from the point of his pick or “millbill.” Some of these slivers became imbedded under the skin, and an itinerant stone dresser looking for work could prove his experience by “showing his metal,” i.e., the backs of his hands. ”

“ That all millers shall grind according to turn; and shall well and sufficiently grind the grain brought to their mills; and shall take no more for toll or grinding, than one eighth part of wheat, and one sixth part of Indian corn.
Other phases of governmental interest in grist milling involved the exercise of the right of eminent domain to provide watermill sites; the requirement that roads be established and maintained leading to mills ”

“ An eighteenth-century cutaway drawing, from Diderot’s great French encyclopedia, showing the structure and mechanism of a post mill. The artist has “lifted” the body of the mill a few feet off the post to reveal the pivot bearing on which the massive crowntree would in fact rest. Note also the power takeoff from the brake wheel for the sack hoist. ”

“ Throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century the tobacco colonists grew wheat and corn for home consumption only. And “home 10 consumption” in most instances meant literally that. The typical plantation, an almost self-sufficient community in many ways, raised wheat enough for the owner’s family and sufficient corn to feed the slaves and animals.
In his report of 1724, called The Present State of Virginia, Hugh Jones avowed that:
As for grinding Corn, &c. ”

“ The identity of the man or men who invented the windmill is also lost in the mists of antiquity—or at least of the Middle Ages. The earliest authenticated reference to a windmill in western Europe refers to one that stood in France about the year 1180. ”

“ To meet changes of weather they are furled by hand, each arm in turn being stopped at the lowest position while the miller unties the outward corners and twists the long strip into a more or less tight roll. ”