Part 2

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."

Such merchant mills, as advertisements in the _Virginia Gazette_ attest, were usually connected with a plantation. Advertisements for the lease or sale of other farm property repeatedly contained the phrase "convenient to church and mills." 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.

Carter estimated his total outlay to keep the mill running at £5,000 per year, but the return was correspondingly great. The mill was a success from the start, and the Revolution soon added to its importance and its business. For several months in 1780 the mill worked eighteen hours a day grinding for the state, and Carter received six bushels of corn a day in toll. After 1785, however, Carter found it unprofitable to work the mill himself, and leased it to other operators.

Although on a smaller scale, George Washington also engaged in merchant milling. His Dogue Run mill, formerly a plantation mill only, was rebuilt in 1769 as a merchant mill. He installed a pair of French burr stones to grind the export flour, while a pair of Cologne stones did the country work and ground Washington's own crops. Washington also provided a nearby dwelling house and garden for the miller and his family, who could raise chickens for their own table but never for sale.

"The whole of my Force," Washington wrote in 1774, "is in a manner confind to the growth of Wheat and Manufacturing of it into Flour." Some of the wheat he proposed to sell in London if the price were right, if the freight and commission charges were not too high, and "if our Commerce with Great Britain is kept open (which seems to be a matter of great doubt at present)." He did ship some flour directly to the West Indies but disposed of most of his "superfine flour of the first quality" through merchants in Norfolk and Alexandria.

Washington, like Carter and other Virginia merchant millers, felt the loss of West Indian markets after the Revolution. But he continued his interest in milling into the better times that followed the establishment of a stable national government. Washington, in fact, received one of the first licenses to use the milling improvements invented by the Delaware millwright, Oliver Evans. As late as 1799, the year of his death, he wrote that "as a farmer, Wheat and Flour constitute my principal Concerns."

As a millowner, one of Washington's chief worries seems to have been very much the same as that of William Byrd a century earlier, namely, to obtain the services of an honest and diligent miller to operate his mill. The problem had faced Robert Carter, too, who sent inquiries as far as New Jersey. That other Virginia planter-entrepreneurs faced the same challenge is apparent in many advertisements in the _Virginia Gazette_ of the time.

When Washington rebuilt the Dogue Run mill, he was fortunate in hiring William Roberts as miller. Not only was Roberts an honest man in his employer's opinion, but also a highly capable miller. Washington gave him full credit for the fact that flour from Dogue Run commanded top prices in Alexandria and the West Indies markets.

For several years the arrangement was ideal. Then Roberts grew more and more interested in a wheat product other than flour. By 1783 he had become such a drunken sot that the squire of Mount Vernon began seeking a replacement, only to relent when the miller promised to reform his ways. However, this pledge, like its predecessors, soon dissolved in alcohol, and Washington finally fired Roberts.

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." This arrangement fell through--perhaps Roberts celebrated too heartily--and the President finally leased the mill to his overseer, James Anderson.

_ALL THAT THE LAW ALLOWS_

It was said earlier that legal restrictions on milling crossed the Atlantic along with the jolly practitioners of that craft. Indeed, the history of milling in the colonies is fully punctuated by the regular passage or amendment of laws to "rectifie the great abuse of millers," as the first such law in Virginia put it. This first Virginia law appeared as early as 1645 and fixed the allowable toll at a generous one-sixth. Such a law had been passed ten years earlier in the Massachusetts Bay colony.

In neither colony, however, did the law seem to be effective without frequent amendment. The Massachusetts General Court repassed and strengthened its regulation five separate times in thirty years; the Virginia burgesses acted the same number of times in an even shorter period. A prohibition against taking excessive toll and the setting of penalties and fines for violation figured in every revision of the Virginia law throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The basic regulation, passed in 1705, provided:

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; that mill dams be wide enough at the top for a carriage way, include locks for navigation and fish slopes if necessary, and not be built above or too close below an existing dam; the inspection of flour to assure uniformly high quality, free from impurities; the requirement that millers have and use measures tested for accuracy; and so on. From such legislation it will be seen that milling, ostensibly a purely private venture, partook strongly of the nature of a public utility.

In view of the mill's vital importance to the community, as revealed in this legislative history, it is no surprise to learn that the miller was considered essential too. Along with certain officials of the colony, clergymen, plantation overseers, the gaoler, schoolmasters, and some other groups deemed necessary to orderly civil life, millers were exempt from service in the militia. Furthermore, since militia musters were often occasions of prolonged revelry, any miller who "shall presume to appear at any muster" was to be fined one hundred pounds of tobacco or be "tied Neck and Heels" for up to twenty minutes. Only when the need for foot soldiers became all-consuming in 1780 was the militia exemption lifted. Until then the miller was expected, and obliged, to keep his nose to the millstone.

The miller, thus, seems to have had a split personality--at least in the public mind. On the one hand he possessed an ancient reputation for dishonesty that called for repeated legislative curbs and punishments. On the other hand, he was so indispensable to community welfare that the law got after him if he took a day off for public carousing as other men did.

At least since Greek and Roman times the miller, who performed a task once relegated to women and slaves, was traditionally held in low esteem by reason of his calling. Yet some colonial millers were respected and influential men, and sometimes men of substance. John Jenny built the windmill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1636 and was chosen by his fellow townsmen to represent them in the General Court. Two years later he was indicted for failing to grind his neighbor's grain well and seasonably. The nearby town of Rehoboth similarly elected its miller to the General Court. But he refused to leave his mill in order to serve as deputy and was fined!

In colonial Virginia the social position of the miller was less subject to violent fluctuation than would seem to have been the case in New England. In fact, the Virginia miller was uniformly a man of low estate, far inferior to the owner-operator of a mill in a New England town, and outranked also by the sturdy bourgeois millers of the middle colonies. Those who worked for wages enjoyed few privileges, while the many Virginia millers who were either Negro slaves or white indentured servants had little social standing. The records contain a goodly number of references to runaway millers who were indentured servants, convict servants, or slaves; if any Virginia miller in colonial times rose to a position of importance, no record has yet been found.

_THE SAID WILLIAM ROBERTSON'S WIND MILL ..._

Most windmills belonged to one or other of the two basic categories: post mill or tower mill. The truth of this general rule is easily proved by the exception--the composite mill that belonged to neither group, but was in effect a post mill set on top of a tower. Another truism--perhaps without any exception--states that since every mill was custom designed and made by hand, no two were exactly alike.

Every English and colonial millwright had his favorite tricks of design and construction, and often the mills of a region showed a family resemblance that distinguished them from the mills of the neighboring shire or colony. In addition, improvements and refinements were developed from time to time and gradually put into use. Many of them, like the grain elevating machinery invented by Oliver Evans of Delaware and the adjustable lattice sails of the English inventor Sir William Cubbitt, came long after 1716-1723, the years during which Robertson's original mill was built.

Clearly, this is not the place in which to describe the almost infinite variety in structure and operation of windmills in different places and at succeeding stages in the perfection of the mill as a machine. A list of a few easily procured books appears on page 32 for those who wish to pursue the subject further. This little pamphlet must be limited to a description of the reconstructed mill in Williamsburg and how it operates.

First, a word needs to be said about the men behind the mill, Edward P. Hamilton, former director of historic Fort Ticonderoga, New York, and Rex Wailes, then of London, who were Colonial Williamsburg's consultants in the careful process of design and construction. Mr. Wailes, a world authority on mills and milling machinery, furnished information on all phases of the use of windmills in England, and in particular provided measured drawings of a seventeenth-century mill still standing at Bourn in Cambridgeshire. Mr. Hamilton carried on from there. By vocation an investment counselor (retired) and by avocation a collector of watch and clock mechanisms, an authority on windmills in America, and a skilled model builder, he transformed the drawings into miniature reality, creating a perfect working model in which every part performs the function assigned to its larger counterpart in the mill itself.

William Robertson, who sold to John Holloway in 1723 four lots near the Palace "whereon the said William Robertson's wind mill stands," was not a miller. Neither was Holloway. The records left by both men provide no clue as to the exact appearance of the mill in question. In fact, the deed to the land itself did not give any more precise location for the mill.

Reconstruction of the mill, therefore, had to depend on answers to two questions: Just where did Robertson's windmill originally stand? and What kind of a mill was it?

By eliminating every other possibility, the site of the lots was established with certainty at the corner of North England and Scotland streets. By elimination again, the spot where the mill must have stood was placed at or near the present site--simply because other buildings were known to occupy various other locations in the tract. Thorough archeological excavation of the whole area, however, disclosed no corroborative evidence to show the precise location of the mill.

At the same time, the absence of such evidence was itself almost conclusive evidence that the mill was a post mill such as were common in tidewater Virginia at that time. A tower mill, which was the second variety often built hereabouts in colonial days, would have had foundations in the ground. Traces of these would have been revealed by digging at the site. Since none of the foundations excavated in the four lots was suitable to the underpinning of a tower mill--ergo the mill must have been supported above ground on a wooden post.

And so it was rebuilt: a small post mill, simple in design and operation, with but a single pair of millstones. The tail pole, extending to the rear, ends in a wagon-wheel support that eases the miller's task of turning the mill by hand to face the wind. Other millers sometimes had shoulder yokes attached to the tail pole, or pulled it around with the help of a small winch anchored to one of a circle of posts.

The stairway from the ground up to the body of the mill, called the "ladder," is hinged at the upper end so that when the mill is to be turned, a lever raises the foot of the ladder off the ground. When the mill has been positioned to face the wind, the end of the ladder is lowered to the ground again where it helps hold the mill against further turning.

Beneath the body of the mill are the heavy timbers on which it rests: the horizontal "crosstrees," the sloping "quarterbars," and the great post, all hand hewn of well-seasoned oak. The tree from which the post is hewn was itself young when Williamsburg first became the colonial capital. A count of its annual rings shows it to have been a sapling in 1675, which makes it one of the town's oldest "antiques."

Mounting the ladder and looking into the mill's lower or "meal floor," we see that the post ends in a wrought-iron bearing set into another beam of impressive size that "crosses" the post like the top of a giant "T." This beam is the "crowntree," on which the framework of the mill body is built. Below the lower floor is another bearing or loose collar around the post to keep the body steady on its perch.

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 sails of the Williamsburg mill are of the early pattern in which the backbone of each sail frame extends along the centerline of the sail. That is, the area of sail ahead of the backbone--in the direction of turning--is the same as the area following it. Incidentally, windmill sails usually turn counterclockwise (viewed from in front of the mill).

The sailcloths themselves are handmade, of imported Scottish linen. 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. For this purpose he can set and release the brake from the ground, using the rope that hangs out the side of the mill.

Whereas each sailcloth of Robertson's windmill must be wholly furled or not trimmed at all, the sails of many early mills could be partially reefed. The four degrees of reefing were known as full sail, first reef, dagger point, and sword point. Trimming the sails was a difficult and sometimes dangerous task, for a sudden storm with sleet and shifting gusts of wind could make the job almost impossible at the very moment that it had to be accomplished quickly. A miller caught with his sails up in such a storm might suffer what was known as "tail winding" if the wind veered faster than he could work. In this event he might be lucky to get off with nothing worse than having the sailcloth stripped from the frame.

A hurricane could do more serious damage--and might overturn the whole mill--no matter which way it faced. For the wind was the miller's master as well as his servant, an evil genius that he feared as well as a heavenly blessing for which he prayed. Without wind the mill stood idle and the miller earned nothing. When the wind arose the miller must heed its call to work, whether in the middle of a meal or in the middle of the night. And always, he must keep a weather eye on the horizon for signs of too much wind.

Fire and lightning were other great perils to every windmill. 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. In a wind of about twenty miles an hour, which seems to be generally best for windmill operations, it will turn at about twenty revolutions per minute. 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 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. Actually, it is not exactly horizontal but slants at a ten-degree angle. Since the wind has always been thought to descend from heaven, this ancient arrangement may at one time have been intended to let the sail wheel "look up" a bit into the wind. It has, in any case, both structural and aerodynamic advantages.

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.

The brake wheel, a little more than seven feet in diameter, is firmly fixed to the windshaft and turns at the same speed as the sails. Its fifty-one hickory gear teeth and eighteen other major pieces, plus at least as many wooden pegs to hold the pieces together, were all carefully shaped and fitted together by hand. 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. Its normal speed for best results is 108 revolutions per minute, at which speed it produces five to ten pounds of meal per minute.

The cogs of the brake wheel stay in constant mesh with the staves of a sort of wooden-bird-cage gear called a "wallower." This is fixed to the upper end of the wrought-iron vertical drive shaft, whose lower end stands in the center or "eye" of the runner stone and turns it.

This simple drive mechanism is complicated by the fact that the runner stone must be held suspended above the bed stone. Ideally, the faces of the two stones--however close together--should never touch. To accomplish this, the runner stone is balanced to turn freely on the point of a spindle that comes up from below through the eye of the bed stone. The spindle, in turn, rests at its lower end in a pivot bearing that can be raised or lowered very slightly by a series of levers.

By this means the miller can adjust the distance between stones according to the kind of grain he is grinding and also according to the speed at which his mill is operating. In a variable wind, for instance, he may have to make the adjustment continuously as the feel of the meal coming from the stone indicates.

The faces of both stones must be "dressed" periodically--perhaps once every ten days when the mill is in constant operation. For this the runner stone must be removed and turned over so that the stone dresser, with his pickaxe-like "millbill," can operate on both faces. The dresser deepens the furrows, if necessary, and roughens the "lands" between the furrows toward the outer edges of the stones.

When the stones are in good condition, the grain kernels are opened out near the eye of the stones, gradually reduced in the middle area, and the bran scraped and cleaned in the outer one-third of the face. The condition of the bran is the best index of the stone dressing, while the feel of the meal tells the miller whether his mill is running at the best speed and if the stones are set at the proper distance apart.