Water-powered mills were among the first businesses that started operating during northern Illinois’ pioneer period. On ‘my’ section of the Fox River, which runs from Montgomery south to Yorkville, four water-powered mills served the needs of local residents during the 1840s and early 1850s.
Photographs of the buildings—three gristmills and one combined sawmill-furniture factory—exist. But recently I got interested in what was actually inside the mills during their working years. Fortunately, there was a way to find out.
Parker & Sons mills on the Fox River just above Oswego. The sawmill and furniture factory is in the right foreground while the gristmill is across the river just to the left of center. Little White School Museum collection.
For many years, the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company published maps of virtually every community in the U.S. that included accurate building footprints as well as, in the case of commercial buildings, their contents so insurance adjusters would be able to determine the amount of loss in case of fire. And all four mills had been recorded by Sanborn.
Starting with the region’s pioneer millwrights, farmers brought their grain to their local gristmill to be ground into either fine flour or coarser meal. At the mill, the grain was weighed and then shunted by chutes and bins into the smut room to prepare it for milling.
In Oswego, Parker & Son’s mill at the west end of the Fox River dam had two smutters—modern farmers would recognize them as fanning mills—that used mill wheel-powered fans to clean the grain of smut, mold, and mildew and remove the lighter weight bad kernels.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Company’s image of the Parker gristmill. Little White School Museum collection.
Then, the grain was directed by chutes to the mill’s five run of millstones. Each run of stones consisted of a pair of circular stones, one of which rested on the other. The bottom stone, or bed stone, was firmly fixed in position, while the upper stone, or runner stone, rotated, powered by the mill’s water wheel. The runner sat on a large iron or steel pin called the spindle that extended through the center of the bed stone and rested on a wooden beam. Using levers, the miller could raise or lower the beam to increase or decrease the fineness of the flour or meal produced, testing the flour’s coarseness with his thumb as it exited the stones—thus the term ‘rule of thumb.’
Each run of stones sat in a wooden tub, called a vat. The miller directed grain into the center hole of the top runner stone through a chute called a shoe. As the runner turned against the bed stone, the runner’s weight ground the grain into flour. As the grain was ground, the flour was forced to the edges of the stones by centrifugal force, where it fell into the wooden vat, and by the vat’s sloping bottom into another chute that routed the flour into bins. From there, it went to the bolters.
Parker’s mill had two bolters that used the mill’s water power to separate newly ground flour into three grades, fine, middling, and bran, the hard outer layer of a kernel of wheat or corn. The bolter was an octagonal reel, usually 16 feet wide, fixed at a gentle incline, and covered with a series of open weave cloths of increasingly coarse mesh. Unbolted flour was directed from a bin into the raised end of the bolter. As the mill’s water-powered machinery slowly turned the bolting reel, the finest flour fell through the fine mesh at the head of the bolting reel, while the bran finally left at the very bottom of the reel.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Company’s illustration of the Parker gristmill on the west bank of the Fox River at Oswego. Little White School Museum collection.
A middling purifier, also part of the Parker mill’s equipment, separated the coarse bran from the middling flour the bolter had separated in the middle of the bolting process.
In addition to grinding grain into flour or into coarser meal, Parker’s mill also had a corn sheller, where farmers could bring ear corn to have the kernels removed from the cobs. There were also two separators at the Parker mill that could separate farmers’ wheat and oats from the stalks.
Millers accepted payment for processing grain in both cash and by accepting part of the ground grain, whichever the farmer preferred.
Besides his Oswego gristmill, William Parker also owned and operated the William Parker & Son Furniture Factory, located at the east end of the Fox River dam, opposite the gristmill. Nathaniel Rising had added the sawmill opposite the gristmill in 1848. Parker bought the mills and dam four years later. Parker added the furniture factory to the sawmill in 1875 to process the large stands of black walnut trees along the Fox River in Kendall County into furniture.
By 1885, Parker’s sawmill and furniture factory were equipped with two rip saws, three cut-off saws, one scroll saw, and one band saw; a planer and matcher to smooth both sides of the boards produced; one pony planer that smoothed one side of a board at a time; a sticker, a machine that produced small sticks of wood used to separate layers of stacked lumber to allow proper air circulation; a mortising machine and a tenoning machine to produce mortise and tenon joints; one shaper and dovetail machine; a drill press; a lathe; one emery wheel and two grind stones.
The factory produced a variety of chairs, tables, chests of drawers, and other furniture. A walnut Parker washstand is on exhibit at Oswego’s Little White School Museum.
Gray’s Mill, built by Montgomery’s founder, Daniel Gray, still stands at the west end of the Montgomery Bridge. One of the stonemasons who worked on the three-story limestone building was Oswego Township farmer John Hemm. The covered bridge was moved to Montgomery from Aurora, and was replaced in 1913 with a concrete bridge. Little White School Museum collection.
Meanwhile up in Montgomery, the Hord Brothers & Company Montgomery Roller & Feed Mills—now known as Gray’s Mill—had just two run of millstones by the middle of the 1880s. Instead of their previous large run of millstones, the mill’s turbine wheels also ran seven sets of metal rollers that ground grain more efficiently than millstones. A much larger operation than the Parker mill, Hord’s mill featured a large smutter, three bolting chests, each with five bolters, two centrifugal purifiers, three flour packers for collecting and bagging flour, and a separator.
Gray’s mill sat atop the wide, and fairly long millrace at Montgomery, where the extra force of flowing water was needed to power all of the mill’s machinery. Evidence of the millrace’s existence can still be seen along the riverbank north of the bridge today. Little White School Museum collection.
Down on the north side of today’s Yorkville—then the Village of Bristol—the Blackberry Mills at the mouth of Blackberry Creek on the Fox River were equipped with a smutter, three run of millstones, a flour cooler designed to cool the warm flour or meal before it entered the bolters, three bolting chests plus three additional small bolting reels, a middling purifier, and a separator.
By the 1880s, the era of water-powered gristmills was quickly passing due to the cost of maintaining them and the dams they required. Floods on the Fox River frequently damaged the dams, and at period of low water, the mills had to close down until enough water started flowing to power the machinery. During the winter months, it took constant maintenance to keep the millraces that directed water to the turbine wheels free from ice—a dangerous, wet, and cold job.
The Fox River Valley’s water-powered gristmills were eventually replaced by steam-powered grain elevators and local furniture makers by giant far-off factories. If you’ve seen the PBS film “Ben’s Mill,” which was produced back in 1982, you’ve seen a water-powered mill in action. If you haven’t, you can get an idea of how clever 19th Century mechanics made use of water power in this excerpt of the film on YouTube. Although water powered mills are long gone from the Fox Valley, some evidence of the time of that water-powered industry is is still around if you look closely enough.
historyonthefox 