The old wagon track running down the branch to the old mill site is clogged with briars and young saplings. Trees surround the milldam, and laurel and alders hide the channel where a wooden wheel turned and furnished power that ground many a bushel of corn into meal. Only the millstones remain behind. And they now decorate the yard of the old farmhouse nestling in the cove, mute testimony to a vanished age and a vanished occupation.
Nobody remembers the name of the stonemaster who cut the grinding stones and nobody knows where he got the superprime stone from which he fashioned them. But the old millstones were grinding out meal here on the banks of Mountain Creek more than a hundred years ago. And some folks remember the old water-powered gristmill before it crumbled into decay and finally disappeared.
The folks who brought their corn by sled and wagon and on horseback made it a sort of frontier mecca. As their grain was being ground, the menfolks talked and whittled and gathered gossip to take back to their wives on the lonely farms. And while they waited, the freshly ground meal poured off the grinding stones.
Only a few of the old mills have been preserved, but you can see a good many old millstones about the country today. They have become rare collector’s items and used as decorative motifs in yards of summer homes, antique shops and country inns. Sometimes you will find them stuck in the ground as monuments or placed side by side to make walls, or as cornerstones for a walk. Indestructible, they remain as symbols of a lost art.
The old gristmill that stood down on a creek is long gone, its indestructible millstones remain behind as symbols of a vanished age and a vanished occupation.