For many Americans today, water mills are powerful symbols of the serenity, beauty, and quiet pace of our past. Mills, with often picturesque millponds, are frequently depicted on calendars and post cards. Mills connote the values of hard work, local sufficiency, neighborly cooperation, and a friendly accord with natural resources. Mills harnessed the power of streams with little long term impact on the surrounding environment or the overall ecology of the millstream. Long before the advent of fossil powered industry, waterpowered mills made possible the localization of processing and manufacturing. Corn or wheat could be ground or cotton spun locally without the extensive capital investments of large factory structures or transportation infrastructures.

The typical nineteenth century mill in this area was the grist mill. Grist mills ground the locally grown grain into wheat or corn flour for domestic use. In the fall after the grain was gathered, it was brought by the bushel, bag, barrel or wagon load to the local mill. Mills were located on most of the perennial large streams and were scattered throughout the country side so that the distance to the nearest mill was seldom more than ten miles often only five or six miles. In the later years of the nineteenth century as flour milling became an industrial process and "store bought" bread [="sliced bread"] became more widely available, mill power was diverted to other process. The same power that turned the heavy millstones could also drive spinning machines and some wood and metal cutting machines.

Mills, like churches, stores, schools, and courthouses, became "centers"--both actual and symbolic centers of gathering. Mills were places that people met to conduct their business and to share their news. Thus the economic web of mill life and its role in the domestic economy of the countryside linked up with the social web of life for the farmers and the members of their families. A trip to the mill was not only the occasion for processing an essential food source, it was also an occasion for families to meet and talk, for children to play and throw rocks in the mill pond, and for young people to court. While the wheels ground the grain, the family might have a picnic under a nearby tree.

The grist was often bagged and stored in either burlap or "feed sack" bags. Feed sack cloth was an important domestic item for the three-quarter century period from 1875 to about 1950. Although more typically associated with retail feed stores rather than mills directly, some mills maintained small mill warehouses where the grain and grist was stored in bags. The colorful feed sack bags[link to scanned color image of feed sack material: header=A typical feedsack pattern]--the cotton print bags--were important in the household economy of the rural people because they supplied essential dress and bonnet making material. A trip to the mill could be powerfully important to the farmer's wife because it offered a rare social occasion as well as a chance to pick out new feed sack cloth for making dresses. Sometimes when the farmer went alone to the mill or feed store, he carried in his pocket swatches of cloth from previous grain sacks with the instruction to buy grain in matching sacks so that some household sewing project could be completed.

In 1850 there were hundreds of mills in Tennessee, a dozen or more in the immediate Franklin County area. After 1850 many mills began to close as the development of improved train service meant that centrally produced goods could be quickly distributed over a wide area. New and larger factory models for industrial processes also eclipsed the mills. And as steam and then electrical power became widely available, milling processes were no longer dependent on the variable flows of small streams nor upon the rough efficiency of the large drive wheel necessary to capture the energy of the flowing water. Most of the old mills are gone today. Here and there a few survive and serve as reminders of a once more common way of life. Traces of our mill past is reflected in surviving place names such as Hurricane Mills, Falls Mill, and Cortner's Mill.

[mill pond image]

Pictures of old mills

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