gristmill

A gristmill or grist mill is a building in which grain is ground into flour, or the grinding mechanism itself. In many countries these are referred to as corn mills or flour mills.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Early history 1.2 Classical British and American mills 2 Modern mills 3 Functioning historic gristmills 3.1 Canada 3.2 United States 3.3 United Kingdom 4 Ruined, remnant, or partially preserved gristmills 4.1 United States 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

History

Early history

The first water powered gristmills in Europe were built toward the end of the first century BC. The first written account is that of Strabo, describing the mill at Cabira, in operation in 63 BC. These mills had horizontal wheels. Vertical wheels were in use in the Roman Empire by the end of the first century BC, and these were described by Vitruvius. The peak of Roman technology is probably the Barbegal aqueduct and mill where water with a 19-meter fall drove sixteen water wheels, giving a grinding capacity estimated at 2.4 to 3.2 tonnes per hour. Water mills seem to have remained in use during the post-Roman period, and by 1000 AD, mills in Europe were rarely more than a few miles apart. In England, the Domesday survey of 1086 gives a precise count of England's water-powered flour mills: There were 5,624, or about one for every 300 inhabitants, and this was probably typical throughout western and southern Europe. From this time onward, water wheels began to be used for purposes other than grist milling. In England, the number of mills in operation followed population growth, and peaked around 17,000 by 1300.^[1]

The first geared gristmills^[2] were invented by Muslim inventors in the medieval Islamic world, and were used for grinding grain and other seeds to produce meals, and many other industrial uses such as fulling cloth, husking rice, papermaking, pulping sugarcane, and crushing metallic ores before extraction. Gristmills in the Islamic world were often made from both watermills and windmills. In order to adapt water wheels for gristmilling purposes, cams were used for raising and releasing trip hammers to fall on a material.^[3] The first wind-powered gristmills were built in what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in the 9th and 10th centuries.^[4]

Limited examples of gristmills can be found in Europe from the High Middle Ages. An extant well-preserved waterwheel and gristmill on the Ebro River in Spain is associated with the Real Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Rueda, built by the Cistercian monks in 1202. The Cistercians were known for their use of this technology in Western Europe in the period 1100 to 1350.

Classical British and American mills

Classical mill designs are usually water powered, though some are windmills, or powered by livestock. A sluice gate is used to open a channel and so start the water flowing and a water wheel turning. In most such mills the water wheel was mounted vertically, i.e., edge-on, in the water, but in some cases horizontally (the tub wheel and so-called Norse wheel). Later designs incorporated horizontal steel or cast iron turbines and these were also sometimes refitted into the old wheel mills.

In most wheel-driven mills, a large gear-wheel called the pit wheel is mounted on the same axle as the water wheel and this drives a smaller gear-wheel, the wallower, on a main driveshaft running vertically from the bottom to the top of the building. This system of gearing ensures that the main shaft turns faster than the water wheel, which typically rotates at 10 rpm, or so.

The millstones themselves turn at around 120 rpm. They are laid one on top of the other. The bottom stone, called the bed, is fixed to the floor, while the top stone, the runner, is mounted on a separate spindle, driven by the main shaft. A wheel called the stone nut connects the runner's spindle to the main shaft, and this can be moved out of the way to disconnect the stone and stop it turning, leaving the main shaft going to drive other machinery. This might include driving a mechanical sieve to refine the flour, or turning a wooden drum to wind up a chain used to hoist sacks of grain to the top of the mill house.

The grain is lifted in sacks onto the sack floor at the top of the mill. The sacks are emptied into bins, where the grain falls down through a hopper to the stones on the stone floor below. The flow of grain is regulated by shaking it along a gently sloping trough (the slipper) from which it falls into a hole in the center of the runner stone. The milled grain (flour) is collected as it emerges through the grooves in the runner stone from the outer rim of the stones and it gets fed down a chute to be collected in sacks on the ground or meal floor. A very similar process is used for grains such as wheat, kamut, etc to make flour as well as for maize to make corn meal.

In order to prevent the vibrations of the mill machinery from shaking the building apart, a gristmill will often have at least two separate foundations.

American inventor Oliver Evans revolutionized this labor-intensive process. At the end of the eighteenth century he patented and promoted a fully automated mill design.

Old fashioned flour mill	Gristmill hopper, Skyline Drive, VA, 1938. Grain was funneled through the hopper to a grinding stone below	Corn over the grinding stone in Kenyon's johnnycake flour mill in Usquepaugh, RI, (near Kingston) 1940	Gristmill drive machinery, Thomas Mill, Chester County, PA
Pedal powered wheat mill, Shediac Cape, New Brunswick	Remnants of some of the scores of flour mills built in Minneapolis between 1850 and 1900. Note the underground Mill race that powered mills on the west side of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls	Phelps Mill in Otter Tail County, Minnesota	Wheel of the 1840s-era Grist Mill at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, MA
"Slipper" feeding corn into the grindstones of George Washington's Grist Mill	Splash mill from Småland, Sweden	Weir at the old grist mill in Thorp, Washington	Old turbine wheel at the old grist mill in Thorp, Washington
The grist mill at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts	Stockdale Mill on the Eel River near Roann, Indiana

Modern mills

Historically, gristmills contained rotating stones powered by water or by wind; later mills used steam engines for power, and modern mills typically use electricity or fossil fuels to spin heavy steel rollers. These techniques produce visibly different results, but can be made to produce nutritionally and functionally equivalent output.

Gristmills only grind clean grains, that is, grain from which stalks and chaff have previously been removed, but some mills also housed equipment for threshing, sorting, and cleaning prior to grinding. Gristmills also grind corn into meal.

Modern mills are almost certainly "merchant mills", that is, they are privately owned and accept money or trade for milling grains, or the corporations that own the mills buy unmilled grain and then own the flour produced. Early mills were almost always built and supported by farming communities and typically a percentage of each farmer's grain called a "miller's toll" was set aside for the miller in lieu of wages. Although gristmill can refer to any mill that grinds grain, the term historically was used to refer to a local mill where farmers brought their own grain and received the flour from it, minus the "miller's toll."^[5] Modern mills use serrated and flat cast iron rollers to separate the bran and germ from the endosperm. The endosperm is ground to create white flour which may be recombined with the bran and germ to create whole wheat or graham flour.

Functioning historic gristmills

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page.

Canada

• Balmoral Grist Mill Museum, Nova Scotia
• Kings Landing Historical Settlement, New Brunswick, Canada
• Morningstar Mill, St. Catharines, Canada
• Arva Flour Mill, Arva, Canada
• Watson's Mill, Manotick, Ontario, Canada

United States

Alabama

• Kymulga Mill, Childersburg, Alabama

Arkansas

• War Eagle Mill, Rogers, Arkansas

California

• Bale Grist Mill, Napa, California

Georgia

• Old Mill at Berry College, Rome, GA

Indiana

• Spring Mill State Park, Mitchell, Indiana
• Stockdale Mill, Roann, Indiana

Iowa

• Pine Creek Grist Mill, Wildcat Den State Park, near Muscatine, Iowa

Massachusetts

• Dexter Grist Mill, Sandwich, Massachusetts
• Wayside Inn Grist Mill, Sudbury, Massachusetts
• Jenney Grist Mill, Plymouth, Massachusetts

Michigan

• Pears Mill, Buchanan, Michigan

Mississippi

• Sciple's Water Mill in Kemper County, Mississippi was built in 1790 and owned by four families over the next fifty years. The Sciple family bought the property in about 1840 and has kept it running ever since. This mill also ginned cotton and sawed lumber until the 1950s.

Nebraska

• Florence Mill (Omaha, Nebraska)

New Hampshire

• Littleton Grist Mill, Littleton, New Hampshire

New Jersey

• Cooper Mill, Chester, New Jersey

New York

• Stony Brook Grist Mill, Stony Brook, New York

North Carolina

• Mingus Mill, Cherokee, North Carolina
• West Point Mill, Durham, North Carolina

Ohio

• Clifton Mill in Clifton, Ohio is one of the oldest grist mills still in operation.

Pennsylvania

• Newlin Grist Mill, Glen Mills, Pennsylvania
• The Mill at Anselma (Lightfoot Mill), Chester Springs, Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

• Carpenter's Grist Mill, Perryville, RI

South Carolina

• The Boykin Mill, in Boykin has an operating grist mill where meal and grits have been ground by water power for over 150 years.

Washington

• Cedar Creek Grist Mill in Woodland, Washington

West Virginia

• Glade Creek Grist Mill in Babcock State Park, West Virginia

United Kingdom

Ruined, remnant, or partially preserved gristmills

United States

Connecticut

• Gurleyville Grist Mill, Mansfield, CT

Minnesota

• Mill Ruins Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota

New Hampshire

• Sanborn Grist Mill, Loudon, NH

South Carolina

• Price's Mill

Virginia

• Causey's Mill, Virginia

West Virginia

• Audra State Park, West Virginia
• Valley Falls State Park, West Virginia

Washington

• Thorp Mill, Thorp, WA

Washington, D.C.

• Peirce Mill, Washington, D.C.

References

See also

• grist
• water mill
• windmill
• tide mill
• water wheel
• textile mill

External links

• Historic Mill Information and Images
• The Society for Preservation of Old Mills
• Old Stone Mill National Historic Site of Canada
• Stockdale Mill
• Greenbank Mill
• Gristmill diagram and description
• North American Millers' Association — How Wheat Flour is Milled
• Worlds Grits Festival St. George, SC
• Site of first grist mill in North America, 1607
• Prewetts Mill A British mill built in 1861 driven by steam until the 1970s
• Working Mill in Pickwick, Minnesota, 1854
• Cooper Mill - Working Grist Mill in Chester, New Jersey 1826
• Newlin Grist Mill - Only Working Grist Mill in Pennsylvania
• War Eagle Mill - A Working Water Powered Grist Mill in Rogers, Arkansas