Part 1

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THE MILLER in Eighteenth-Century _VIRGINIA_

An Account of Mills & the Craft of Milling, as well as a Description of the Windmill near the Palace in _Williamsburg_

_Williamsburg Craft Series_

_WILLIAMSBURG_ Published by _Colonial Williamsburg_ MCMLXXVIII

_The Miller in Eighteenth-Century_ Virginia

The reader of this account, being of open mind and charitable disposition, as good men and women have ever been, will readily recognize that whatever may appear in these pages to the discredit of millers in times past cannot be taken to reflect in any fashion upon the present master of Mr. Robertson's windmill. Indeed, the age-old repute of the calling is as distasteful to him and his colleagues of today as it would be inappropriate if applied to them.

Unhappily, it cannot be denied that millers of an earlier day--those of Chaucer's generation, for example--left something to be desired in the way of scruple. That gifted storyteller and honest reporter of the age in which he lived gave prominent place in his _Canterbury Tales_ to two millers. One of these was the villain and ultimate victim in the Reeve's Tale: "A thief he was, forsooth, of corn and meal; And sly at that, accustomed well to steal."

The other miller of the _Canterbury Tales_ was himself one of the pilgrims, as merry and uncouth a rogue as one could find in any band of cathedral-bound penitents: "He could steal corn and full thrice charge his tolls; and yet he had a thumb of gold, begad." That last remark, an allusion to the proverb that "every honest miller has a thumb of gold," cut a broad swath indeed. Only Chaucer's own regard for truth could have moved him thus to dignify the popular belief that among millers integrity was as rare as twenty-four-carat thumbs.

Similar distrust can be discerned in early feudal and manorial laws in England, which prescribed certain methods of operation for grist millers and established corresponding penalties for violation. The miller was directed to charge specified tolls for his services, and no more. The lord of the manor got his grain ground "hopper free," since he generally owned the mill and held the local milling monopoly. Under the thirteenth-century Statute of Bakers, chartered land-holders paid the miller one-twentieth of the grain he ground for them, and tenants-at-will gave one-sixteenth, while bondsmen and laborers had to part with one-twelfth of what they brought to the mill.

The same law also required that the miller's "toll-fat" (or dish) and "sceppum" (or scoop) used to measure grain be accurate. The manorial seal on a measure testified that it had been compared with the standard measure and found exact. But millers in all lands and times (the present excepted, of course) have been adept at finding ways to outwit law and customer at the same time.

A method popular among some millers was to build square housings for the millstones, thus providing four innocent corners in which quite a bit of meal could collect. The more artful members of the craft built a concealed spout that carried a small proportion of the meal to a private bin while the visible spout delivered the bulk of it to the customer's container.

Other stratagems, too varied and too numerous to list here, testify to the craftiness of many millers. The lengths to which the law went in trying to keep up can be seen in an English statute of 1648. This law, closing one loophole through which a miller could levy a hidden toll, allowed him to keep no hogs, ducks, or geese in the neighborhood of the mill, and no more than three hens and a cock.

All of this ingenuity, most of the popular suspicions of the milling craft, and some of the legal restrictions consequent upon both, crossed the Atlantic along with the millers and millwrights who came to the colonies. More details of this in a moment; meantime, what of the mill that belonged to the man that owned the name of rascal?

_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. Finally, the Roman quern, rotating continually in the same direction and shearing the kernels between grooved faces of matched stones, opened the door to the use of natural instead of muscle power.

History does not record the name of the man, probably a Greek, who first harnessed natural power to grind grain between opposing stones. Possibly it happened when his wife handed him the family quern with the command, "Here, you do it!"--in Greek, of course. What he did, instead of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, was to apply brain power. He fixed a water wheel to the lower end of a vertical shaft and attached the upper end to the upper stone of his handmill. And then, no doubt, he went fishing in the millstream while the flowing water did his work.

In the anonymous Greek's footsteps, a Roman named Vitruvius made the arrangement more flexible by introducing wooden gearing to transmit the power. Others made further improvements in the slow progress of time until the watermill was a reasonably efficient and widely used machine. The Domesday Book, or census of the year 1080, recorded 5,624 mills in England alone, all operated either by animal or water power.

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. The next known reference dates from 1191 and concerns a windmill in England. Both were post mills, more or less like the reconstructed windmill of William Robertson in Williamsburg. This is the simplest among several types of wind-operated mills and was the type first adopted in Europe, in England generally, and in the colonies.

Anyone who has read much poetry cannot fail to realize that a watermill is by nature a more romantic machine than a windmill. Poets recognize this as a fact, and perhaps non-poets who have spent some well remembered moments down by the old mill stream will agree. But this is not to say that windmills are lacking in emotional appeal and romantic inspiration. Far from it. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:

"There are few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a breeze over a woody country, their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business of making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tame landscape."

_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." In the latter case the substructure of timber bracing was not above ground, but was buried in a mound of earth.

The comparison to a flagpole-sitter is perhaps misleading, for the post does not end where the mill house begins. Rather, it enters the body of the mill through a loose fitting collar beneath the lower floor and extends about half-way up into the mill, where it ends in a pivot bearing. The entire weight of the mill--sails, body, millstones, shafts, gears, grain, meal, and miller (to say nothing of the mill cat, kittens, and resident mice)--rests on this single bearing at the top of the great post.

Keeping so much weight in stable balance was no great problem for the millwright as long as the mill did not move. The collar or ring bearing around the post kept the body from tipping far in any direction--or was supposed to. Moreover, the millwright estimated the weights of the various elements and positioned them appropriately about the pivot. Of course, things sometimes came out wrong. A mill that tipped incurably forward was called "head sick"; one that always tipped backward was "tail sick."

When the mill was in motion the matter of stability became a good deal more complicated. For various reasons, including aerodynamic and gyroscopic effects that the early millwrights sensed but did not fully understand, the balance of a windmill is different in operation than at rest. The successful millwright, therefore, needed an accumulation of trial-and-error knowledge that might go back for generations.

The result, even though most everything but the millstones was of wood, was a surprisingly stable and exceedingly durable structure. A post mill built in Lincolnshire, England, in 1509 was still in operation in 1909! And although any storm might leave tragedy in its wake, post mills toppled over less often than their precarious position and top-heavy appearance would seem to promise. In this respect the Williamsburg mill is doubly guarded, being equipped with removable metal braces and buried ground anchors for use in the event a hurricane is predicted. This adaptation, to be sure, is a twentieth-century safety measure, not an eighteenth-century custom.

The problem of balance, and the related difficulty of maneuvering a post mill to face the wind because its whole weight is focused on the one bearing, generally limited such mills to one or two pairs of stones. Some English post mills had three pairs and a few even four. But these exceptions demonstrate the limitations of the post mill and the reasons for development of its successor, the tower mill.

The purpose in this development was to transfer weight from the pivoted upper portion of the mill to solid ground beneath it. 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.

The so-called "smock mill," common in Holland and brought to England probably in the time of James I, is a tower mill whose structure is framed and covered in wood rather than built up of masonry. Examples of this variety of mill can still be seen on Nantucket Island, Cape Cod, Long Island, in Rhode Island, and perhaps elsewhere. The eastern end of Long Island contains more colonial windmills than any other part of the United States today, and all without exception are smock mills.

_INDIAN CORN AND COLONIAL MILLS_

Both windmill and watermill have been intimately associated with the development of the English colonies in America from their earliest days. This, of course, is not a matter of wonderment since bread was the staff of life then even more than it is today. No doubt all the early settlements had mortars or small hand mills, and in many cases they also employed larger ones powered by animals.

The first settlers at Jamestown in 1607 brought with them full and detailed instructions drawn up in advance by the Virginia Company of London. The 144 men and boys were to be divided into three working groups: one to build a fort, storehouse, church, and dwellings; the second to clear land and plant the wheat brought from home; and the third to explore the surrounding countryside in search of the Northwest Passage, mineral riches, or other resources that might return dividends to the company's stockholders.

As it turned out, the planting of grain received less than prime attention. Defense against the Indians was a more pressing demand, and many of the gentlemen settlers were unwilling to soil their hands with menial labor. An exploring party, however, reported that it had observed at the falls of the James River five or six islands "very fitt for the buylding of water milnes thereon."

Several years seem to have passed before any mill was built in Virginia. In 1620 the Company sent word that it considered the construction of watermills of first importance. The next year it specifically instructed the colonists to erect corn mills and bake houses in every borough.

Actually by 1621 the first mill had been put up by Governor Yeardley on his own plantation near the falls of the James River. But it was a windmill, not a watermill, and for at least four years seems to have been the sole facility of its kind in the whole coastal wilderness of North America.

The first mill in the Massachusetts Bay colony, where waterfalls were considerably more frequent and closer to the coast than in tidewater Virginia, was also a windmill, built in 1631. In New Amsterdam the first mill, again a windmill, was erected in 1632. In Virginia by 1649 there were nine mills in operation, four windmills and five watermills, and the number had grown as fast or faster in other areas.

Exposed coastal areas on Cape Cod, around Newport, Rhode Island, and on the eastern end of Long Island, as well as on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Virginia were found especially well adapted to windmills. Massachusetts in particular saw a rapid rise in milling. It was there, under the aegis of John Pearson, "the father of the milling industry," that commercial milling got its early start in America.

At somewhat later stages a similar boom in milling activity took place in New Netherland, New Sweden, and their successor English colonies. For several decades New York held the crown as the wheat-growing, grist-milling, and flour-exporting capital of the New World, only to be superseded about 1700 by Pennsylvania.

_WHERE TOBACCO WAS KING_

In Maryland and Virginia, where tobacco was the king-sized money crop, grist-milling developed along a somewhat different path. Throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century the tobacco colonists grew wheat and corn for home consumption only. And "home 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. they have good mills upon the Runs and Creeks; besides Hand-Mills, Wind-Mills, and the Indian invention of pounding Hommony in Mortars burnt in the Stump of a Tree, with a Log, for a Pestle, hanging at the End of a Pole, fixed like the Pole of a Lave.

Often the planter owned and operated a grist mill for his own use and that of the neighboring small farmers. William Fitzhugh, for example, described his fully equipped layout as including, in 1686, "a good water Grist miln, whose tole I find sufficient to find my own family with wheat & Indian corn for our necessitys and occasions." Fitzhugh thus needed to grow no grain of his own to feed his "family," an expression that to him included not only the white indentured servants who lived and worked on the plantation, but also his twenty-nine slaves.

Such a mill represented a considerable investment of capital, and it was this initial cost as much as any other factor that determined the pattern of mill ownership in Virginia. So far as records survive to tell the story, all of the colony's early mills were built on plantations, either by well-to-do colonial officials or by syndicates of neighboring planters. Most of these early mills, if not all of them, were built primarily to grind the owner's produce. 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.

It was out of this combination plantation-custom type of mill that the merchant mill finally developed in Virginia. The first William Byrd was well ahead of his fellow planters in developing milling as a business, although he lagged far behind John Pearson of Massachusetts. In 1685 Byrd had erected two water grist mills at the falls of the James River--the very power site of which Captain Newport's exploring party had remarked. He asked a friend in London to hunt up and send over one or two honest millers to run the mills and sent inquiries to the West Indies about selling the flour he expected to make.

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.

In 1769, for instance, George Washington rebuilt his mill on Dogue Run near Mount Vernon, and imported French stones to grind export flour. Robert Carter, probably Virginia's wealthiest planter-businessman at the time, had been experimenting with other crops on his tobacco-exhausted acres and had fixed on wheat as the best substitute for the "Imperial weed." By 1772 Carter was buying wheat in 8,000 and 10,000 bushel lots to grind in his mill near Nomini Hall.

The merchant mill was not a business venture in itself, but a facility in the business of exporting flour or supplying ship's bread. The merchant miller did not make his profit through the provision of a milling service; he actually bought the grain and processed it on his own account, making a profit or loss on the sale of the product. In many instances the merchant miller not only ground wheat into flour, but also baked the flour into bread for export--particularly in the form of ship's biscuit.

The owner of a custom mill, on the other hand, did not buy and sell grain at all, but found his income as a portion or toll of the grain he milled. The pure custom mill was a rarity in Virginia, however, being limited to a few establishments in and around the towns of Manchester, Petersburg, Norfolk, Alexandria, and Williamsburg.

A mill in Yorktown, too, was presumably of this sort. In 1711 the owners of land on the York River just below Yorktown Creek deeded a parcel to William Buckner for a windmill, on condition that he "grind for the donors 12 bbls. of Indian corn without toll." A view of Yorktown drawn about 1850 shows an abandoned smock mill--very likely the original one--standing lonely and forlorn on the hill in question.

_HOW WAS IT IN WILLIAMSBURG?_

Very little information about milling in Williamsburg has survived from colonial days--or at any rate has been unearthed by diligent research. We do know that Williamsburg was considered to offer many choice locations, and that several mills were erected in the town or in its immediate vicinity before the Revolution. As far back as 1699, when the burgesses were thinking of moving the capital from Jamestown to Middle Plantation (as Williamsburg was then named), a student of the College of William and Mary extolled the proposed site in a formal speech, one of several made to an audience that included the governor and his council as well as the burgesses.

The college itself was already located at Middle Plantation, on the ridge between the James and York rivers and with creeks flowing to each. In the words of the student orator, "The neighbourhood of these two brave creeks gives an Opportunity of making as many water mills as a good Town can have occasion for, and the highness of the land affords great conveniency for as many Wind mills as can ever be wanting."

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 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. Samuel Coke, the Williamsburg silversmith, owned a grist mill, also water powered, less than one mile away.

What information we have concerning Williamsburg windmills is limited to three fragmentary items. First, in 1723 William Robertson, clerk of the General Assembly, holder of a number of other government offices, lawyer, and land speculator, deeded to John Holloway four lots in Williamsburg, "being the lots whereon the said William Robertson's wind mill stands."

Second, during the Revolution an American soldier who kept a diary of his experiences mentioned being "near the windmill, in Williamsburgh" one night before the siege of Yorktown.

Finally, an unknown French mapmaker, presumed to be in the service of Rochambeau, drew a very careful and complete billeting map of Williamsburg and the buildings in it. On this map appears a representation of a post mill just on the southern edge of the town.

Beyond these three items the story of milling in Williamsburg has to rest on careful deduction, the cross checking of every pertinent fact, the following of every lead, the consultation of every source--in sum, on a mass of research.

For example, evidence as to how the Williamsburg windmills functioned has long since disappeared. Because Robertson's mill was within the city, however, it can be said with reasonable certainty that it operated as a custom mill, not a plantation mill.

_MILLING AND THE VIRGINIA PLANTERS_