GERALD JOHNSON'S MILL

The 16" Williams Mill I have originally belonged to my grandfather, Rufus Johnson.  He operated it in conjunction with his small country store at Squirrel Creek,  North Carolina which is in Avery County in the far Western end of the state.   He had ten kids with my father, Treely Johnson, being the one that ran the mill during the late 1920s and early 1930s.  Grandpaw eventually decided to swap this mill for a 20" model.  The man he swapped with lived in Newland, North Carolina.  My daddy hauled the mill to Newland on the 1928 Chevrolet truck they had.  The man they traded the mill to used it to grind corn and buckwheat.  He powered it with a 6 h.p. Fairbanks Morse "Z" engine.  The man to which the mill was traded had a son that was close to daddy's age.  He became a heavy equipment operator and over the years did a great deal of work on the various house construction jobs for my daddy and his brothers who all took up the carpentry trade.  In 1984 my wife Minnie knew how much I wanted a flywheel engine.  I was having no luck finding one locally so she took up the search.  She heard rumors of an old engine that might be for sale.  Ironically it turned out to be the engine used to pull the mill once owned by my grandfather !  She called my fathers friend  and asked it the engine might be for sale.  He said he did not know if he would sell or not because his son might want it. He told Minnie to call him back in a few days which she did.  He agreed to sell the engine for $75 .    She and daddy immediately went to get it.   It was disassembled and nothing but a pile of rust that had been exposed to the elements for at least 20 years.  The shed in which it rested had collapsed on top of it and the engine had sunk several inches into the dirt.   Daddy got to reminiscing with his old friend and asked him what ever happened to the old mill.  His friend replied..."grannies,  what's left of it is in that old building with the engine" (grannies is a mountain contraction for "by granny"...a nice way of swearing).  Daddy asked if he would sell it.  The answer was "no I won't sell it, but I will give it to you."   When daddy and Minnie started digging it out, there was nothing left but the stones, the iron parts and about a 10" square piece of the grain hopper.  The entire wooden case was rotted away.  Then engine and mill parts were loaded on daddy's old 6 cylinder Ford pickup with a backhoe.  It was all they could do to get such a heavy load up the hill to our house.  When I got home from work that night, I could not believe the bad condition of everything...but to daddy it was wonderful !   One trait I never inherited from my father was his optimism.   We decided that I would restore the engine and daddy would restore the mill he had operated as a young boy some  60 years before.  As a child I remember daddy talking many times about the mill.  We always assumed it was a Meadows since there were more common in the area.  We drove to North Wilkesboro, North Carolina and met with the owner of Meadows Mill Company...a VERY nice man.  I went armed with about twenty close-up snapshots of all the mill pieces.  He looked through them and immediately said "it is not a Meadows!"   He could see our disappointment and said..."wait a minute".   He disappeared into their big vault room for about fifteen minutes.  When he came back he had a freshly copied manual for a Williams Mill.   It turned out that Meadows bought the Williams patent from the Williams family around 1925.  He showed us one particular view of a cast frame brace which was identical to one in the snapshots.    With this manual, daddy had something to go on.  We came back and he started measuring the drawings to get the dimensions of the timbers to use.  He went to a local sawmill and got kiln dried fir beams for the job.  He finished it in a few weeks...much quicker than the fourteen months it took me to restore the engine.   Daddy was a carpenter for 55 years and woodworking came naturally to him.   Some of my fondest memories are of daddy sitting beside the mill at engine shows telling people the story I have repeated here.   When we tried to grind with the restored mill, it would do nothing but crack the corn and would not grind even a course meal.  Later,  at the Asheville, North Carolina show, I met an old gentleman grinding meal with a Meadows mill.  I told him of my problem and he immediately told me my rocks were not parallel to each other.  He told me how to fix it...which required taking the case apart again.  When daddy re-cased the mill, he did not use the original case bolts that allowed the mill to be opened up for sharpening because he did not have them.  I guess they are still buried in the dirt at the old collapsed shed where the mill was left to rot for years.  He made the case solid which requires tearing it apart to work on.  I disassembled it and re-cemented the stationary rock as the old man instructed.  It now grinds fine.   Over the years I have learned a great deal about grinding from these old millers.   Our daughters love the mill and take every opportunity to work with it.   Usually I can't get near it when it is grinding because they want to do all the work themselves.  My father passed away in 1991 at the age of  eighty two.  Each year we take the mill  to our church Heritage Day where we celebrate the old ways our ancestors lived and thrived in this mountain community.  Ironically, the church is located about 50 yards from the same place my father operated the mill as a boy.  I like to think he is there to help us each year.  I guess you could say the mill has come full circle and is back home again.                                  
              (story courtesy Gerald Johnson, Newland, NC) taxback@hci.net

Photo courtesy, Dallas Cox, High Point, NC