Portable sawmill 
Sawmill in operation
Inner workings of grist mill
Fountain Spring Mill
Grain Milling Industry
Early MillsGrist for the Mill
It
was the year 1837, and times were hard all over the country. Thousands of
people were leaving the "civilized" comforts of Pennsylvania and
Ohio to make a new start in the recently opened Iowa country. Already towns
had been laid out along the western bank of the Mississippi River, and settlers
were pushing up the Des Moines River.
Paths Into Untamed Country
Rivers were the paths of civilization
into the untamed country, which was often difficult to travel by foot or wagon.
The smaller streams that fed the rivers were also very important as a source
of power for mills. It is no wonder that the river valleys were quickly settled.
Samuel Clayton had built his cabin at the mouth of Chequest Creek in the Des
Moines River Valley in 1836. Now his two grown sons, Henry and James, traveled
from Ohio to help him. Together they built the first grist
mill in Iowa west of the Des Moines River.
But the Clayton mill would not be used for sawing lumber. The stream, backed
into a pond by a solid dam of clay, stones and tree branches, pushed a water
wheel. But the machinery powered by the turning wheel was a pair of large
round stones, called millstones or burrs. These stones ground corn into meal
and wheat into flour. This was a necessary step in making bread. To best understand
the art of grain milling, we need to take a step back.
Pioneers Grind by Hand
The earliest European settlers in
Iowa ground their corn by hand, as the pioneers in the East had done before
them. This job was often done by the children of a frontier family. It took
a long time to crack and grind corn kernels into meal using a wooden mortar
and pestle. Luckier families owned a hand grinder, which made the job easier.
Others used a carpenter's plane to grate the corn off the cob (called "jinted"
corn). But a mill—if there was one in the area—was by far the
best way to grind corn.
While the Claytons were putting a building up around the mill and shaping
millstones from boulders found nearby, word of the new mill spread. Farmers
came from as far as twenty miles away to have their grain ground. Because
few people on the frontier had money, Mr. Clayton usually kept part of the
ground grain as payment for his work.
Creek mills like the Clayton's did not run all the time, because the water
in the pond was not always high enough to provide power. When the mill did
not run, the farmers just had to wait to have their corn ground.
In their first years on new land, farm families raised just enough grain to
meet their needs. But as farmers planted more land, they looked for a larger
mill than Clayton's—one that could buy their extra flour. Such mills
were usually built on a river, where the water supply was more dependable
and where there were wagon roads or steamboats to carry the flour to other
cities.
New
Technologies Change Milling
As soon as they could get them,
the millers bought steam engines. Steam power did not depend on the height
of the water, and one engine could turn several sets of stones at the same
time.
It took special care and skill on the part of a miller to produce fine flour.
For two thousand years millstones—or burrs—had been used to grind
flour for bread. The kind of stone used for burrs was important, and they
had to be kept in good condition. The grooves in the stone had to be carefully
carved and fitted.
Even when the miller had good stones, grinding wheat had special problems.
Inside the grain of wheat is a soft oily part called the germ. When the burrs
crushed all the wheat grain at once, the oily germ could cause the grist (or
"ground grain") to stick together. Then only a small amount of fine
flour was produced. The rest had to be sold for animal feed or as a cheaper
grade of flour.
The invention of the roller mill by a Wisconsin man solved this problem. The
wheat was run through five or six sets of rollers. After going through each
set, the grist was cleaned and separated. In this way, the germ could be separated
out, and more fine flour was produced from the wheat than ever before. Roller
mills replaced the ancient millstones.
With the arrival of railroads, milling was taken over by large milling companies
in the cities of Iowa, and most local millers went out of business.
But the planting of wheat year after year had begun to wear out the land.
Iowa wheat crops did not produce as many bushels per acre as they once had.
Worse, in the 1870s and 1880s chinch
bugs and grasshoppers invaded Midwestern farmlands, wiping out the wheat
crop in those years.
Discouraged by thin crops and natural disasters, Iowa farmers turned away
from wheat and planted more corn and oats. By 1890 Iowa was set on its future
course, having taken first place in national corn production. And in 1900
it became first in oat production. By this time most of Iowa's smaller mills
were empty and silent. There was no longer any use for them. The corn was
fed to cattle and hogs, and the oats were made into cereal using a different
method. Only a few large milling centers continued to work.
Early grain milling left its mark on the face of Iowa. Rivers and streams
are still haunted by the half-standing remains of old mills, ghosts of a time
that rang with the splash and creak of their water wheels.
