Historic Milling

Below is a transcript of only part of Steve Bashore’s interview with Dr. Joseph Stoltz. You can hear the full interview in an episode of Conversations at the Washington Library.

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What is your background?

I have been fortunate to learn a lot about milling and distilling in the last eleven years here at Mount Vernon. 25 years ago, I started working at my first historic mill and learned how to run water-powered machinery and grind grain. A few years at that mill led me to another historic site, Stratford Hall, which is an 18th-century house, with a restored mill that I operated and helped a millwright restore again.

When the position opened up here at Mount Vernon in 2007, they were restoring the distillery and the gristmill was running, they needed somebody to manage the site. I applied and was fortunate enough to get the job. I never would've thought years ago I would end up in this sort of field.

Could you tell us about historic milling?

Milling is an ancient tradition that goes back to 100BC. Roman historian Vitruvius describes in pretty great detail a vertical wheel water mill with wooden cog gearing. By the time of George Washington, water mills are fairly advanced and some of them quite complex. What is neat about the trade is that you are in a way, in a very basic, rudimentary machine, but there are aspects of it that are more highly technical, and the skill set to run them is technical. I love the fact that it marries both things.
In the history of mills, there have been two ways to grind grain: by pounding, grinding, or with a roller. The modern mill is a roller mill, which came around in the 19th century. In Virginia in the 18th century, there were windmills but most were water powered.

As a miller running a water mill, you have to really get to know the machine. Whatever mill you run, you learned pretty early whether it is running in the right manner, or there is something wrong, and you have to learn technical things too in order to take care of it and run it properly.

Then there is a division between running for demonstration purposes versus actually making food grade product. I think the separation is important to note in that there are many people that can run mills and give tours. To do actual production grinding is another level and we produce a product to sell to the public and use in our Mount Vernon Inn.

What is milling’s place in colonial Virginia society?

It is twofold because mills had to be there for sustenance. Most landowners of a certain wealth level would have the capital to construct a water mill. There are certainly these estate mills, or plantation mills like Washington had, and there are independent mills. People that maybe owned some acreage around the mill, whose main job was to ground grain, brought to them by farmers.

In the colonial era, some of the regions that became big milling regions were around New York, Philadelphia, the Delaware region, and this part of Virginia. The Caribbean markets opened up in the 1670s. The colonial mills had enough sustenance for the people there, so then they looked for new markets. Early exports to the Caribbean of flour and cornmeal started and they brought back rum and molasses.

The market grows so much that American flour mills are exporting an amazing amount of flour. We have some records here at Mount Vernon that indicate one shipment went to Italy and even Suriname.

You have mills that can produce six, seven, eight thousand pounds of flour a day by the time of Washington. One could argue there was a pretty good development of American industry in the 18th century. Not just in flour, but in sawmills, and in water-powered forges. The iron industry in America was pretty well developed by the time Washington was a fairly young man.