Mill owner

“ Where a hundred are required three hundred besiege the doors, and from the time his mill is started the owner, if he only has average business capacities, will clear £40 a year out of each mill-hand he employs. ”

“ The food also which maintained other workmen while producing the tools or materials, must have been provided in advance by some one, and he, too, must have his profit from the ultimate product; but there is this difference, that here the ultimate product has to supply not only the profit, but also the remuneration of the labour. The tool-maker (say, for instance, the plough-maker) does not indeed usually wait for his payment until the harvest is reaped; the farmer advances it to him, and steps into his place by becoming the owner of the plough. ”

“ With us, almost all land is owned by the cultivator; so that two functions, those of the landlord and farmer, are both united in one person. Although one payment is made, it is still just as distinctly made up of two parts, one of which is a payment to the owner for the superior quality of his soil, and the other a payment (to the same person, if the owner is the cultivator) of profit on the farmer's working capital. Land which in the United States will only return enough to pay a profit on this capital can not pay any rent. ”

“ In no portion of it have changes of ownership had a perceptible influence on the size of holdings. While, in districts of small farming, lands belonging to the same owner are ordinarily distributed among many tenants, so neither is it uncommon, in places where the grande culture prevails, for the same farmer to rent the lands of several proprietors. In the plains of Vexin, in particular, many active and rich cultivators do not content themselves with a single farm ”

“ Miers Fisher,—merchant at Philadelphia, as a common friend and good counsellor; to keep all necessary books and registers; at the end of each year, or sooner, to strike the balance of receipts and expenses for the control of the said farm and the exploitation of the mine, should there be reason for it; to sell at prices, charges, stipulations, and conditions, upon which they shall agree, but In accord with Monsieur Dacosta, owner of the other half, the half of the said farm of Mill Grove, belonging to the grantors ”

“ Aaron, therefore, might choose between seeking a market outside for his pig iron or building a mill to work it. To build a mill would require, first, a large outlay of capital, then an organization of expert workers and superintendents, and thirdly a market for his wrought iron in competition with the product of the established mill, now Enoch’s. ”

“ As far back as 1849 it seems natural to find a plan for financing a mill, by which fifteen planters would take each $4,000 worth of stock, select a site near their plantations, each detail three men, making a building force of forty-five, with teams and an overseer and general manager, the latter one of the stock-holders ”

“ Here again the surplus profits, after the fixed reward of capital--viz., interest at the rate of 5 per cent. per annum--has been paid, are divided between labor and custom; and here again the capital sunk in the mills has been written down from £8,655 to £1,680. Unprofitable machinery is scrap-heaped. The mill has only the best, most up-to-date machinery, and all connected with the works, shareholders and workers, live together like a happy family. ”

“ Another phrase is, “It’s all grist that comes to his mill,” meaning that the individual gets all the breaks and capitalizes every advantage. Then too, there is the phrase, “run of the mill,” which has become synonymous with routine product or performance, and “he has a millstone ’round his neck.” Perhaps the best known of all is the saying, “The mills of the gods grind slowly yet they grind exceeding fine.” Many a man has had this hurled at him when his sins of omission or commission have eventually overtaken him.
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The toll for having grain ground in a grist mill was usually paid in kind. ”

“ We are so absorbed in the tumult of mass output that we scarcely realize the part played by the old mills in rearing the cornerstone of our vast industrial activity. The phrase, “horse power,” now geared to myriad millions of units, in all likelihood, began with the horse-operated grist mill. A horse provided the power. The creaking water wheels with their rhythmic splash, were the outposts of the hydroelectric age which has harnessed rivers and falls and wrought marvels of production the world over. ”

“ But a co-operative cotton-mill that was owned by all the workers, in the old sense of the word would not be owned by anybody. Could any one of these thousand or more men say that any part of the mill was his own personal property? Could he treat a single bolt, or a brick, or a wheel, or a door-nail, as he might have treated a loom left to him in his cottage by his father? Obviously not. No part of the mill would be his own private property, any more than a train starting from Euston Station is the property of any shareholder in the London and North-Western Railway. ”

“ The reason for this is that, generally speaking, the machinery manufacturers have not held their shares for long, while the commission firms have usually been stockholders over a period of years, their holdings sometimes diminishing and sometimes decreasing, but their influence in the affairs of the mills being always felt. A banker's experience was that generally machinery manufacturers taking stock in a mill sold it almost [Pg 213] immediately at a discount; it is not reasonable to suppose that a machinery manufacturer would wish to take stock ”

“ These droits are, first, the barbarous "lods et ventes," or one thirteenth of the money upon every transfer which the habitant makes by sale only; but the original rent can never be raised, whatever value the land may have attained. The rights of the mill, that old European appanage of the lord of the soil, were also reserved to the seigneur, who alone can build mills within his domain, or use the waters within his boundaries for mechanical purposes; but he must erect them at convenient distances, and must make and repair roads. ”

“ Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves. I'll just bet dollars to doughnuts that there is counterfeit money in that package instead of breakfast food. This man Markel looks to me like a crook, and his tall friend on the train didn't look any too trustworthy either. My idea is that they are using the mill as a plant where they turn out the money, then they give it to one of their men on the train and he takes it to some other city for distribution. ”

“ In this neighborhood miners are earning from half a dollar to two dollars a day. There are several large quartz mills not far from here. Common labor is worth ten dollars a month.
September 17. Spent the day in botanizing, blacksmithing, and examining a grist mill. Grist mills, in the less settled parts of Tennessee and North Carolina, are remarkably simple affairs. A small stone, that a man might carry under his arm, is fastened to the vertical shaft of a little home-made, boyish-looking, back-action water-wheel, which, with a hopper and a box to receive the meal, is the whole affair. ”

“ A mill is equivalent to a farm; and to build it, provide it with grain, colza, flour, oil, to keep it going and send its product to market, requires a considerable fortune. Consequently, in many places, the wealth of proprietors is measured by the number of their mills ”

“ The model mill of the State, and of the world, for the reduction of silver ore, is the new 60-stamp mill of the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company. In this mill is to be found all that is valuable in any mill, and much in the way of machinery that can be seen in no other works of the kind. ”

“ From morn till night its wheels go round, transmuting the grain into the various articles of consumption for man and beast, and bringing a goodly share of "honest toll" into the coffers of the unimpeachable old miller. The mill is a great place of meeting for the farmers, and the yard in its front is daily filled with teams from the country, whose owners congregate in groups and converse upon topics of general interest, or disperse themselves, while waiting for their "grist," about the town to transact the various matters of business which had brought them hither. ”

“ A retired mill president, whose decision to leave the field was perhaps affected by the condition she described, regretted that the companies are still laboring under decreased profits as a result of the fact that mills were [Pg 243] built more rapidly than the market for goods expanded to meet the development. [375] Another mill president thought that no more mills are likely to be built in his section too many years. ”

“ Yet he had no impulse to change them. They were unfair because nothing was made of those two intangible assets which [58] sometimes in business are worth more than the physical properties—namely, spirit of organization and good will of trade—all of which would automatically belong to the one who bought out the other’s interest in the mill. This was so because the mill was now the crown of the business. What the firm sold was no longer pig iron, as at first, but wrought iron in standard bars manufactured from the pig by remelting, kneading, hammering and rolling it. ”

“ There seems to be a strange diversity of opinion as to the extent of the participation of machinery manufacturers in the financing of the mills. A mill man of Anderson, South Carolina, said that the machinery people have played a larger part than the commission houses in the establishment of Southern mills; that the machinery business was at a standstill in New England at the time of the great activity in mill building in the Southern States, and the machinery manufacturers began to look about for mills to equip. ”

“ The stock was divided into shares of ten dollars each, which could be acquired only by those who worked in the mill, to be held only during life-time, and earned only in part payment for labor, given according to proficiency and work done, and credited on wages. In this way every employee of the mill became a stockholder—a partner in the mill, receiving dividends on his stock in addition to his regular wages, and every year he worked in the mill added both to his stock and dividends. ”

“ A young lawyer whose firm has had considerable to do with suits over cotton mill securities, referred to the fact that in the process of starting a mill capital is often depleted [Pg 210] before goods are got on the market; at this critical juncture, he said, come to the commission men. Their part has not by any means always been for the good of the people of the South. They get a breeches hold on the president of a mill. The mill may in time go up, but they will have cleared on their commissions. ”

“ Since the last decade of the 19th century the storage capacity of British mills has considerably increased. As the number of small mills has diminished the capacity of the bigger ones has increased, and proportionately their warehousing accommodation has been enlarged. At the present time first-hand stocks tend to diminish because a larger proportion of millers’ holdings are in mill granaries and silo houses. The immense preponderance of steamers over sailing vessels in the grain trade has also had the effect of greatly diminishing stocks. ”

“ Meanwhile the population began to grow, immigrants began to pour in by the hundred thousand, and the westward stream opened up new country and new timber supplies, and a lumber industry of marvellous size began to develop. The small country mill, run in the manner of, and often in connection with, the grist mill, doing a petty business by sawing as occasion demanded, to order for home customers or export, gave way to the large mill establishment as we know it now ”

“ The American mills being devoted to a large variety of operations, instead of being confined to a single process after the manner of those of European type, require a great deal more care in their organization, not merely in the original lay-out for the purpose of arranging for the passage of the stock in processes from the raw material to the finished product in as straight lines as possible, but due consideration should also be given to providing facilities for the enlargement of the mill. ”

“ The mill workers here, as observed in the Bowie case, are typical factory workers, and from its external characteristics the milling operation is certainly an industrial venture.
But in making the factual determination, we must keep in mind that the question here presented is a limited one: is the milling operation part of the agricultural venture? If it is agriculture, albeit industrialized and involving highly specialized mechanical tasks, we must hold it to be within the agriculture exemption. ”

“ Even in the iron industry where could a line be drawn-at the end of mining the ore, the production of the pig-iron or steel ingots, when the rolling mill operation is completed, fabrication on order or at some stage of manufacture into standard merchandise? ”

“ Then he begged him, for God’s sake, to take the mill back again, and that in an instant, for, said he: ‘If it grind one hour more the whole district will be destroyed by herrings and pottage.’ But the brother would not take it until the other paid him three hundred dollars, and that he was obliged to do. Now the poor brother had both the money and the mill again. So it was not long before he had a farmhouse much finer than that in which his brother lived, but the mill ground him so much money that he covered it with plates of gold ”