Part 3

French burr stones produced the best quality flour in colonial mills, and most Virginia mills that ground for export seem to have had a pair of them. Cologne, or "cullin," stones from the Rhine were somewhat less choice, and the same mills often had a pair of these for country work, especially for grinding corn. Stones quarried in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere were also used. The pair in the Williamsburg mill are of quartz-bearing granite quarried in Rowan County, North Carolina. They are four and one-half feet in diameter. The bed stone is seven inches thick and the runner stone ten inches. Together they weigh more than two tons.

Although colonial millers ground all varieties of grain between the same set of stones--making only the necessary adjustment in distance between the stones--Robertson's windmill today processes only corn. But whatever the grain, the difference of a newspaper's thickness makes the difference between a good grind and a poor one. 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 grain, raised bag by bag through trapdoors on a rope sack hoist, is poured into a hopper above the stones, which are themselves entirely enclosed in an octagonal wooden box called the "stone casing" or "vat." Suspended from the bottom of the hopper, an inclined trough or "shoe" carries the grain to the central opening of the runner stone. The turning of the drive shaft constantly joggles the shoe, and by raising or lowering one end of it the miller can regulate the flow of grain to the stones.

The grain is ground as it works its way outward between the stones. At the outer edge of the bed stone the meal falls into the narrow space between the stone and the casing. There, air currents moving with the turning stone continually sweep the meal around to an opening in the floor of the casing.

From this opening a chute leads downward to the sifting device on the lower floor. The sifter, on the left side of the mill as you look in from the platform, separates the bran from the meal. The miller can bag each product almost automatically, since the sifter, too, is constantly shaken by an ingenious connection to the mill's driving mechanism.

The entire mill, thus, is about as simple a machine as one could devise. The moving parts are few and could be called primitively clumsy in comparison to some of the sleek masterpieces of modern industrial design. The miller can make only three operating adjustments: in the sail area presented to the wind, in the rate of grain fed to the stones, and in the distance between the stones. He has no control over wind speed, cannot shift the gear ratio of the mill--or even shift the stones out of gear--and, finally, cannot determine his own hours of work and rest.

Perhaps the reader will be inclined to marvel a bit that the product of such a mill is so good. And perhaps he will look with some compassion on a man who is so completely a slave to the elements. If some of the miller's fellows have been disposed--on occasion--to take just a trifle more toll than law and custom allow, well, let him who is without fault cast the first stone. Millstone, that is.

_SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING_

Greville Bathe and Dorothy Bathe, _Oliver Evans: A Chronicle of Early American Engineering_. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1935.

Richard Bennett and John Elton, _History of Corn Milling_. 4 vols. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1897-1904.

Carl Bridenbaugh, _Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742_. New York: Ronald Press Co., 1938.

----. _The Colonial Craftsman_. New York: New York University Press, 1950.

Philip Alexander Bruce, _Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century_. 2 vols. reprint ed. New York: Peter Smith, 1935.

William Coles Finch, _Watermills & Windmills: A Historical Survey of Their Rise, Decline and Fall as Portrayed by Those of Kent_. London: C. W. Daniel Co., 1933.

Douglas Southall Freeman, _George Washington: A Biography_. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948-1954.

Stanley Freese, _Windmills and Millwrighting_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Louis Morton, _Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century_. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg, 1945.

John Storck and Walter Dorwin Teague, _Flour for Man's Bread: A History of Milling_. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952.

Rex Wailes, _The English Windmill_. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.

----. _Windmills in England: A Study of Their Origin, Development and Future_. London: Architectural Press, 1948.

_The Miller in Eighteenth-Century Virginia_ was first published in 1958 and was reprinted in 1966 and 1973. Written by Thomas K. Ford, editor of Colonial Williamsburg publications until 1976, it is based largely on an unpublished monograph by Horace J. Sheely, formerly of the Department of Research.

Transcriber's Notes

--Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.

--Silently corrected a few palpable typos.

--In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.