By the Old Mill Stream

Having visited a working wind-powered mill in Pella, Iowa, I eagerly wait for the opening hours of the working water-powered mill at Levi Jackson State Park. It’s McHargue’s Mill (only the essential internal parts are original), and run by a friendly former park ranger named Bob. It’s also the final resting place of some forty-odd millstones—an outdoor display which, with overgrown grasses and no identifying markers, looks more like a bizarre cemetery with round, swirl-cut headstones than a fresh-air museum.

All around the mill are ducks and pond and flowing water and trees and the comforting, rhythmic drone of corn grinding between stones. What could be more relaxing way to spend a morning?

Some of these millstones are from as far away as Paris.

When properly balanced, grooved, and maintained, millstones can last hundreds of years. Good ones were so valuable that millers often took them whenever they moved, building a new mill each time.

No matter how humble the building, its beauty is in the details.

Bob explains that angled cuts at the corners kept log buildings from rotting quickly.

A stepped-down runoff like this weir can keep a stream working for the mill a long time; straight dropoffs ultimately undermine the river bottom and building foundation.

Outside, water diverted at the back of the building flows to the front to turn the primary driveshaft and wheel for the mill.

Inside, the same driveshaft sends a wide band of leather around another, smaller, shaft and wheel that actually turns the millstone.

Bob wears protection against the dust of milling. Behind him are the square hopper, where whole grain gets poured in, and the round bin surrounding the millstones. Grain gently falls through the center hole of the upper millstone, gets grabbed and smashed by the spinning stone, and works its way down the grooves of the millstones to the outer edges. Only the upper millstone spins, and it can be raised and lowered to adjust the fineness of the grind.

Ground grain falls into the waiting meal bin.

Wooden paddles for moving ground corn out of the way as more flows into the bin.

Final product: yummy unbolted (unsifted, whole-grain) corn meal in white or yellow.

BONUS! Some interesting phrase origins from milling:
Wait your turn—a bag of grain to be milled was called a turn; when the miller had a lot of customers, they had to “wait for their turn” to go into the hopper.

Put your nose to the grindstone—to check or test something; a miller sniffs the stones for a burnt-grain smell, indicating that the grind is too fast. (The erroneous connotation of this phrase—to work hard—comes from a mix-up with the phrase “shoulder to the wheel,” in which a man exerts effort to move a stuck wagon.)

Grist for the mill—topics for gossip; grist is seed separated from chaff, ready for grinding between stones (or, in the case of words, between teeth and jaws)