The Same Old Grind at the
Wye Grist Mill
by
Dick Cooper

 

Jim Casey reaches into a small opening at the base of the spinning millstone and pulls out a sample of ground corn. He rubs the meal between his thumb and forefinger, testing its texture. “A miller can tell if it is too coarse or too fine by feel,” says Casey, a volunteer miller at the Wye Grist Mill in historic Wye Mills. “That’s where you get the expression ‘Rule of Thumb.’”For Casey and the dozen other volunteers who bring the 329-year-old mill to life for visitors, it is more than an old building in an idyllic setting. It is a window into the past where you can catch a glimpse of a time when the Eastern Shore was a very remote part of a young nation.
“The mill was the center of information,” says Casey, who lives near the Queen Anne’s County crossroads of Starr. “When the miller would receive a shipment of supplies from Annapolis or Baltimore, it would include broadsides and newspapers. That’s how local folks found out what was going on in the rest of the world.”
A mill has stood at this northern branch of the Wye River East since the earliest times of colonial Maryland. Parts of the current white clapboard building that sits hard on the edge of Old Wye Mills Road, just south of Chesapeake College, date to 1682 when the mill opened for business.
“See some of these beams,” Casey says, pointing to the thick wooden supports in the ceiling. “They were hand-hewn using an adz. Those over there show signs of being cut with a vertical saw and others have the marks of a circular saw.” The different cutting marks show the gradual progress of technology from hand tools to saws powered by the mill’s waterwheel.
The mill is now owned by the Friends of Wye Mill, Inc., a non-profit organization that keeps it open and operating to showcase the history of milling and its importance to the community and the growth of the nation.
The ownership of the mill has changed hands numerous times through the ages, according to a time line documented by mill volunteers. During the colonial times the Bennett and Lloyd families, who were some of the largest landowners of the era, owned it. Frequently, the mill was leased out to master millers. By 1778, the Lloyds’ plantation manager, William Hemsley, took ownership of the mill and contracted with the Continental Congress to supply flour to General Washington’s troops.
Casey says that when the mill was built, the small shallow woodland stream that runs next to the mill was a navigable body of water. Bateaus were loaded with 200-pound wooden barrels of flour and floated downstream to Emerson’s Landing, now Wye Landing, where they were loaded onto waiting sailing ships.
The Wye Mill is a local landmark in more ways than one. In 1706, Queen Anne’s County was cut out of Kent and Talbot counties and the mill is the remaining mark of the Talbot-Queen Anne’s boundary.
“The boundary is technically the mill race,” Casey says, adding that it has fluctuated north and south as the raceway changes course.
To show how the mill has changed over time, Casey points out the steep set of stairs that leads to the attic. “A worker would carry a 100-pound sack of grain up the stairs, stopping at the fourth step from the top. There he would turn and pitch the sack into the attic.” That step is heavily worn, showing the effect of the mill worker’s thick boot as he pivoted on it.
But in 1790, that all changed, thanks to one of America’s great inventors, Oliver Evans, who lived in Tuckahoe at the time. Casey says that the Wye Mill was an early adaptor of Evans’ revolutionary new method of moving grain around a mill. Instead of hauling the sacks to a bolter – a large sieve in the attic – and letting gravity feed it into the mill, the grain was dumped down a first-floor trap into a basement bin. Scoops, attached to a continuous belt, carried the grain up to the attic, eliminating the need for the muscle-bound worker to climb the stairs.
Evans, a native of Newport, Delaware, patented his factory automation techniques and holds Patent #3, issued by the newly formed United States of America. Among his inventions was the horizontal auger, a large screw-like device used to move grain in troughs around the mill. It is a design still in use and will be familiar to anyone with a refrigerator with an automatic ice cube dispenser in the door.
As Casey gives a guided tour of the mill, the constant whirring of the millstone adds historic background noise. “Once the mill is operating, the miller can do other things, but you will hear it if something is not right,” he says.
The mill is also a museum to the art of turning grains into soft breads. One exhibit is a hand-cranked mill similar to one used by the Romans. Another is a simple stone-on-stone hand mill used by Native Americans to grind corn.
“These were found all over the Eastern Shore,” Casey says. “But these didn’t originally come from here. Most of these came from the Susquehanna River valley. How would you like to walk up there and carry these stones back with you?”
The mill’s waterwheel was used to harness power for other mechanical processes of the colonial days, he says. One of those was “fulling.” The wool and linen fabrics of the day were often too stiff and coarse for human comfort. A fulling mill attachment was basically a couple of wooden hammers that pounded the fabrics until they were more pliable. The process was called fulling, tucking or walking. The people who did the work became known as Fullers, Tuckers and Walkers. When a vertical saw was powered by the mill, the workers who cut the lumber became known as Sawyers.
Casey says many common sayings have their roots in the miller’s trade. “At harvest time, everyone would show up at the mill at the same time,” he says. “You would have to get in line and ‘wait your turn’ of the stone. People gathered at the mill were said to be ‘milling about.’ If you wanted your flour the same way as last time, you would tell the miller you wanted ‘the same old grind.’”
In a history of the mill, Casey wrote that the state acquired the mill and the 15-acre pond in the mid-1950s to preserve the mill and turn the pond into a fishing lake. Two hurricanes in 1955 broke the dam and damaged the mill. It was rebuilt and began milling cornmeal again in 1959.
In 1996, the mill was turned over to the Friends of Wye Mill, Inc. by the state, and the group has been running it ever since.
Casey says area schoolchildren are frequent visitors. “Kids like to grind things,” he says. “We used to give them a small bag of flour at the end of their visit, but we had to stop that. The bags turned into flour bombs on the bus ride back to school.”
The Wye Grist Mill is at 14296 Old Wye Mills Road (Rt. 662) in Wye Mills, Maryland. It is open to the public from mid-April to mid-November from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday and from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday. A $2 donation is suggested. Fresh milled flour and meal are for sale in the mill gift shop. For information about group tours, contact the mill office at 410-827-3850 or e-mail info@oldwyemill.org. More information about the mill and its history are on its website at www.oldwyemill.org.

Dick Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He and his wife, Pat, live and sail in St. Michaels, Maryland. He can be reached at dickcooper@coopermediaassociates.com.