Additional Windmill Resources

Windmills of New England:
Their Genius, Madness, History & Future
by Dan Lombardo

Interview With Jim Owens, April 17, 2002, Eastham, Cape Cod

by Dan Lombardo

Born Eastham, April 1928

Right after I was born my father got a job working with the government at Lakehurst(?) Naval Air Station working on derigibles so we went there to live. That’s why I have pictures of the U.S.S. Los Angeles up there... he worked on that one and the Shenandoah. They shut the program down in 1934 and he had to hunt another job. That was the worst part of the Depression. Not 1929 but 2 or 3 years later. He was able to pick up a job at the Newport Torpedo Station and he worked there almost all the rest of his life.

I was a commercial artist for 9 years. I got tired of it and dec. I would much rather teach school. I went back to school at NYU in New York.... (I had the advantage I joined the army at the end of the war, but I was still eligible for the G.I. Bill... something I never thought I’d be able to do because my family didn’t have the money to send me to school. In fact, I had gone in the army with the idea of making a career out of it. A number of members of my family had done that... in the Nave, the Coast Guard. When I found out I could go to school... it was a whole different world. I got out of the service and went to art school.) The first job offer I got was here (Eastham); how could you do better? This is where I wanted to teach but I didn’t think I’d pick up a job out of thin air like that... 1962.

I got involved in local history because I’ve always liked history anyway. And I always thought of this as home. My mother died when I was quite young, and I did second and third grade in Eastham at the old elementary school. It’s now a museum up on the corner. So I always had a real attachment to the place. It was always home to me because I had always lived in so many other places. Howard Quinn, who was a Selectman, approached me one day. They needed someone to work at the mill. One of the two guys who worked there had become ill. He was quite elderly; he was pushing 90. He couldn’t do it anymore, so he (Bill) asked me if I wanted the job for the summer. You always needed something to supplement your teaching income, so I took it and I’ve been doing it ever since... It was 1974 or 1795.

I run the mill, so I kind of claim the title of “miller” but I’m not really very experienced. We’ve done some grinding. We haven’t done it for a while. My ambition is to get it up and running again in the near future... It’s a chancy business. You need extra people around because the arms are quite dangerous when they run. People will step right up into the path of them to get an unusual photograph. Bingo you got a court case on your hands. The way it works nowadays – you could be as stupid as you want and get paid for it. I really think it should be run...

The first year I worked there a guy came in who was from England. He was just touring the eastern US with friends. He wandered in because he had an interest in mills. He was from Brighton and had restored several mills from there. He told me about this mill organization. I joined it. I got all kinds of stuff from them, and they run a symposium every four years. The last one was in Va., the first time in this country, the one before that was in Hungary, before that in Wales, and the one before that in Germany. The first one I ever went to was in Ghent in Belgium, and the next one in 2004 is going to be in Portugal...

I fell into it. But a lot of things you just fall into.

There’s something sort of majestic about them to begin with (windmills). In addition to that, if you look at the history of mankind, it was the ability to raise farm crops which made it possible for people to stay in one place. In other words bread. Bread was the beginning of civilization. Before that everyone spent all there time hunting for food. They were shepherds. They kept animals but they were moving them all the time for feed. Moving them all the time for a variety of reason. They were always hunting to supplement their diets. So you didn’t have time for anything. And then suddenly you could sit down in one place, grow a crop, hold it for the winter, grind it as you needed it to make bread. And you had food all winter long. And now you develop a civilization. One guy makes pots better than anyone else, he becomes the potter. This guy becomes the shoemaker. Somebody else becomes a weaver. And so on, and they start specializing. Then you get religions growing out of that, and you get governments growing out of that. The whole shooting match grows out of bread. In MY view it does. And so it’s still one of the basic components of life.

Farming started all over the world, in the same millenium. Different crops. Different kinds of wheat, or rice, or barley, or rye, maise, corn. So everywhere in the world people started farming at the same time. They all got the same idea at the same time. There’s a certain unanimity about that. It’s like, for instance, one of the most common children’s games, all over the world, with groups of people that had nothing to do with each other is cat’s cradle. Crops up everywhere. It’s an old traditional game for kids. Eskimos had it, all kinds of people had it, who had no contact with other people.

In the beginning people ground by hand, then they started using animals, and they made bigger millstones. And about 2,000 years ago the Greeks invented watermills. The Romans didn’t use them much because they had so many slaves they had to keep busy... Then around the time of the 1st crusade windmills began cropping up all over Northern Europe. The Flemish basically. And no one really knows why or how. Although there is some speculation that apprentice millers went off on Crusades, met Arabs in Holy Lands, who said, “Yeah, we have mills, but we run them on.” And they did, but they were the kind of thing that went around this way (horizontally), and that’s a Persian type of mill. And in describing they said, “Well, they’re the same way we do waterwheels.” So when they went home, they thought of it as a round motion this way (vertically), so they built sail. The earliest ones were in a fixed direction, toward the prevailing wind. Til someone said, “If I can move this, I can run it more often.” So they did. And they gradually developed... All kinds of variations, depending on what you had for power. Once the idea of milling... gears and machinery, all kinds of ways of transferring power from here to there, and step it up and step it down with gears. Once you got that going, then it was just a matter of adapting that machinery to whatever power source you had, whether it was a river, or a stream or the wind or an animal, or whatever it is.

They’re busy all year round. One of the things people don’t understand very well is that stone ground whole wheat flour doesn’t keep very well. The oils in wheat germ go rancid in no time at all and with corn meal it gets full of bugs in no time at all unless you refrigerate it. They didn’t have refrigeration so that meant you had to keep like a two week supply of flour around... something like that. When you use it up you go back to the mill for some more. You bring them grain periodically and they’d keep track of how much they owed you in flour. Around here the rule was 1/16 of the grain was kept by the miller. And he could grind that and sell it. That was how he made his money. The shoemaker wouldn’t have time to grow his own crop... and the tailor, the blacksmith, and so on. And then of course they began making white flour by taking the wheat germ and bran out of the flour. And when you do that it won’t go bad.. It might get moldy at some point, if it’s not properly kept. But you take out the stuff that goes rancid... Rats won’t eat white flour.

In the early 1800s in this country they started manufacturing large amounts of flour. And coincidental with that was the advent of railroads that could ship it from one place to another rapidly. That put all the mills out of the business, the small mills. They started it around Baltimore and Washington, making large amounts of flour for the British. Because the British were making a lot of money down in the Caribbean out of sugar cane, rum, molasses, sugar, the whole thing. Making fortunes out of it. And they couldn’t grow wheat down there very well and they needed to feed the people they had working for them. So they couldn’t ship English wheat because it didn’t ship well. It wasn’t the right kind. And they got a hard version of American wheat that they could buy here and ship down there as flour.

A guy named Oliver Evans came up with one of the earliest American patents, for an all-automated water-driven mill. If you ever go down to the Washington area, go out into Fairfax County and go to the Coven Run Mill (?). It’s a big brick building, a water mill. The county owns it and they had it restored using Oliver Evans’ patent drawings. And then the Erie Canal opened up so farming, heavy grain farming moved into upstate New York, then as the railroads went west, the grain farmers went west and the flour producers went with them. Because they had the Great Lakes shipping and they had the railroads. Technology is what drives everything... People are beginning to realize it now, with electronic technology and computers and stuff. People are beginning to realize that that’s what makes history go. It isn’t politicians, it isn’t war, it isn’t generals, it isn’t battles. It isn’t even markets, it’s technology.

When they first started manufacturing cloth in factories, all the small time weavers went out of business. They couldn’t compete. That’s how you got Luddites in England smashing machinery, they were smashing mill machinery, because it put them out of work.

I still have a copy of a Luddite oath somewhere. And there was a weaver’s strike in Germany, they same kind of thing.

The miller was very important. In Colonial America he was exempted from holding office. And any freeman of the town was expected to hold office at some time. To take his turn. He also was exempted from military service, because he was needed in his mill. You couldn’t ship flour from Boston down to here (the Cape), it took too long. It would go bad before it got here...

A local miller was important, and the reason you found several in a town was because it took so long to go from one place to another... So you have mills in South Wellfleet, mills in North Wellfleet, mills in the center of Wellfleet. There were four, five, or six mills in Orleans. Occasionally you’d have one overlapping another one, one went bust or got broken and somebody built a new one.. But all of the towns had them and that’s why they had them. They had tide mills and water mills and windmills. Mostly windmills but there was a tide mill in Pamet, there was a tide mill in Salt Pond, a tide mill in Kesquiagansett (?) There was a tide mill on Paine’s Creek on 6A in Brewster, there was a tide mill in Boston... on Causeway St. there was a mill dam for a tide mill. So there were tons of them.

But curiously, tide mills were confined mainly to the North Atlantic basin, Europe and here. Not in the South of the United States because there’s not enough tide. And not in S. Amer. And not in Africa, because by the time Europeans had settled in those areas technology had bypassed tide mills and they were into steam engines. You could put a steam engine anywhere, and a lot a mills were converted. I was at a mill in Belgium that had a steam engine to run it in a separate building, but whenever there was enough wind they disconnected it and ran it on wind power because it was cheap! A lot cheaper than gasoline or diesel and the old miller was still doing that.

I think people are... if it’s already there... the Judah Baker was restored privately, then the town acquired it and restored it again, then in the early 70s it was reshingled and some work was done on it, but it was in a very poor location. Nobody went to visit it and it was never opened and it began to deteriorate. They and to do a major restoration on it just 2 or 3 years ago. But a group of people in town and went to work and got it done. Andy Shrake did that one. He did a super job on it, but it was in touch shape.

Three water mills, the one in Sandwich, the one in Brewster which is not really accurately done, but is an interesting one because it has one feature that is very, very rare. It has an underdriven millstone: they drive the bottom stone, not the top. And it’s almost never done, it’s quite unusual. That mill was also used to run a factory... a factory village ran off the watermill. Then you have the one on Mill Hill in Yarmouth, Rt. 28. The Baxter Mill. I took some Europeans in there... We had a guy from Japan, from Aust. Germ Dutch Eng and Welsh.

(There seems to be far more int. in w.mills in Eur. Than in this country. Do you find this true?) There are windmill associations in all the major countries. You also have the governments of these countries doing a lot more for windmills than the Amercian government does. The American government does zilch for stuff like that. There are a few things, but in comparison there is so little. The Univ. of Ghent runs a program teaching people how to run a windmill and grind flour. Because they want to keep it alive. We saw three mills on the French side of the border between Belgium and France, that were all under restoration.

(Is there still int. here in building repro mills?)
There’s a guy in Eastham who wants to build an addition on his house in the shape of a windmill. A guy who runs a septic system company. He’s talked to me about it a couple of times. But there’s one by the Mill Pond in East Orleans, there’s one in Chatham, there’s the one down in West Harwich. Built by and architect named Ben Buck from Chatham. He designed this house and mill. I always find it irritating that the Ch. Of Commerce always shows the Joe Lincoln mill, which is not a real mill, it’s 3/4 size reproduction.

There’s three mills in Cataumet. A mill that originally came from Fairhaven. Local lore has it that it came across Buzzards Bay on the ice one winter. They probably did it in more than one piece and took the stones out. But they skidded it across Buzzards Bay on the ice. It’s in Red Brook in Cataumet. There’s another one that was turned into a cute little knotty pine cottage. But it is a windmill. The people there when I visited it did not have an accurate history of it. They claimed it was from 1630 in Orleans! A) there was no Orleans in 1630, B) there were no white people out on this end of the Cape at that time. The first came to Eastham in 1644. I think it was a mill from Falmouth or Woods Hole, originally, or it may have been from Chatham.

(What was it like for the miller and his family.) The Paine Family was a pretty good crowd, of millers and millwrights. I have a booklet from Kinkor. The first Th. Paine came to this country with a 10 year old boy, just the two of them, and settled eventually in Yarmouth. The 10 year old boy grew up to be the Tom Paine everyone knows about, who was Town Clerk in Eastham, and Town Clerk in Truro when he moved there, and a Representative of the Colonial Legislature, and a miller and millwright and everything else. He died 1720. I have a copy of his will (I’ll get you a copy) Among his bequests... he had a windmill. He left the windmill to his eldest son, but he tied a string to it. He had two negro slaves, Molly and .... They were aged and they really couldn’t do much anymore, and they weren’t saleable, and he wanted them taken care of. Whoever got the mill had to take care of these two slaves. They were known only by their first names. Of course when they died they weren’t buried in a regular cemetery, they were probably buried on their property somewhere. There were at least three slaves I know of in the Truro area. One was called Pompey, and I don’t know if anyone knows where he’s buried. It’s an interesting look into family life at that time. There were slaves here, but not many.

Paine built a mill in Barnstable in 1683 I think. There’s a church on that site now. As you come down 6A you go down a hill by the brick customs house, the church across the street. That’s where the mill was. That’s Cob’s Hill (?). So we know he was active in that area. But we know there were other people involved because of the different styles. You tended to build in the style your father built.

A man named Seth Knowles was the 1st man in Eastham to run that mill. There was a family named Horton that owned a mill over by Sunken Meadow. I have a copy of the deed from that... The Hortons were a big family here. They were mostly centered around the area where the golf driving range is in Eastham... the florist place. The florist place was an inn at one time, with a dance floor on the second floor in the 19th c. It was also a stage stop. That was all Hortons around that area. Sunken Meadow, on Massasoit, was where their mill was. The Horton family...
A lot of the mills tended to be owned on shares, and run by one person. A quarter share, or what have you.

(Were they very lucrative?)
They were until after the Civil War. As the railroads expanded and the manufacturing of white flour expanded, they all began to die off. The only ones left were the ones in obscure places where you couldn’t get to the railroads. They were out of the loop. By the 1890s all the mills on the Cape had ceased functioning. At least one of the mills on Long Island was put back into use during the shortages of World War I. They were shipping a lot of flour overseas for relief and for soldiers... But only for a year or two. You’ll find some places in the App. Mountains where people are still using watermills.

As they went West, windmills died out, because by the time of the settling of the West they were already into steam. A very sudden change, the whole business of steam. Steam boats, steam this and that.

Windmills were controlled by local authorities. They set the fees they could charge. I’m always amused by politicians, especially in an election year. Right wing guys run around and say, “Government should stay out of business... leave them alone.” Our Forefathers regulated business with a heavy hand. If you were running a tavern, they had an official measure for ale and beer. They would come in and have you pour a pint of beer, then they would take out their measure and if it didn’t measure up, they broke every jug you had, and you had to replace them all. That’s where the expression, “Mind your Ps and Qs” came from... Mind your pints and quarts.

The miller had and official measure there... we still have a couple of wooden measures in the mill for measuring out eight quarts and one quart. You had to get permission to build a mill from the local authorities, but usually it was a case where if they wanted you to build a mill they’d give you land, they would give you money, sometimes they’d exempt you from taxes. Sometimes they’d do all three. Because they wanted that mill handy so people wouldn’t lose all day traveling just to get flour. When people worked first light to last.

(What was a mill like in the winter time? You couldn’t start a fire in one.)
Flour dust is highly flammable. You could actually start a fire in there without any trouble at all, and get explosions. I have a clipping somewhere amongst my stuff. A place out in Minneapolis where a big commercial flour mill in the late 19th century. The sucker blew up and wiped out a whole block. I had a guy in the mill one time who said he worked in a flour mill where fires burned and it was hard to put them out. If you were sifting flour for cake and had a gas pilot light, it could flash into fire by rapid oxidation. People didn’t think about the hardships.

One of the things you have to be careful of. The miller would be working where the flour’s coming out, on the ground floor, that’s the meal floor, and measuring it out to his customers, and the meal comes out of a shute from the stones on the second floor. If the stones were out of adjustment, they were either too close or running too fast, they create too much heat. They cook the meal and ruin the flavor. So you get this unpalatable taste to your bread because it was already overheated. He could tell that by the sense of smell. He could smell it coming down the tube. And that’s why a good miller always kept his nose to the grindstone. That’s where that comes from.
And another thing, you get a very flat thumb by judging the quality of the flour by rubbing it between your fingers all the time, to tell whether it’s too coarse or too fine: Rule of thumb. I don’t know whether that’s connected...

Normally we don’t open the Eastham mill til the first of July, but one of the last weekends in June we’ll be open because of the Cape Heritage Week. We have an art festival on the green. (I can take you into the E. Or and Chat mills any time you want.)

Interview Andy Shrake some time. He knows what he’s doing. A dry sense of humor. A good craftsman. He has experience like no one else around. I don’t know of anyone who’s worked on that many mills.

(Would we be able to use some of your drawings in this book? – “Yes.”)
There was a guy over in Harwhich who was quire elderly and he was still running a mill. Like a lot of people, got used to machinery over a long period of time and got careless. He was hanging out the sales on the mill so he could run it. And he didn’t bother to put the brake on and it started to turn. He was up there working and he managed to get on over to the shaft, but he had to keep hitching his seat because it kept turning slowly. And finally he would have gotten tired and just fallen off eventually. A neighbor happened to see him up there, and came over and put the brake on.
Kids used to grab onto one of the arms and catch a ride on it. I know someone right here in town who did that. One of the Selectman, Kenny Collins.

The first summer they had the mill restored and ran it here, in ‘36, a local woman was struck in the head and had to go to the hospital. She wasn’t badly hurt, but she had a few stitches. I have clippings.

I don’t know of any mill journals that exist. Somewhere I have in a journal, an English miller’s journal quoted. I have it in here somewhere.

(Miller as center of village)
People came frequently. In those days maybe one or two people got the Boston paper through the mail, it might be two weeks late. That’s how they caught up with the news, the news of the world. So news like that was being disseminated by word or mouth. And gossip was getting about, about who was doing what, to whom, or for whom, or against whom was passed around as well. So it (the windmill) was the central gathering place for everything, for news or gossip or both.

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