A teacher instills a lifelong passion for reading, and historic gristmills in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’ll never forget my third grade teacher. There are some teachers you remember all your life. She was one of them, a caring and patient woman who took a real interest in me and expected much from me in return. I felt almost an obligation to succeed in her classroom, that, coupled with an unspoken creed on the importance of doing well in school and keeping up with homework that was instilled in me from the earliest possible age at home.

One of my third grade textbooks in language arts I remember to this day. And from it, curiously, comes my lifelong interest in gristmills. It was a reader and workbook called “Singing Wherls,” and was written around the theme of a pioneer village in the early 19th century, one of those little settlements rugged Americans carved out of the wilderness as they moved west through Kentucky in search of “elbow room.” When you’re 8-years-old and the world is opening up before your eyes, The kind of book was one exciting pioneer adventure story.

The reader and workbook exercises featured vocabulary words and sentence-building practice from selections from the reader about this example of a prototypical early frontier town. The town businesses included a general store, harness maker, blacksmith, sawmill and, of course, a grist mill on a small stream alongside of which the settlement was laid out.

This entire tableau of the settlement in the wilderness fed my young imagination, and I could see the stagecoach pulling up in front of the small inn and tavern. That village, with its gristmill and tail race canal, remained long after in my memories of that school year. It helped also because from a very early age I’ve been interested in small towns, I guess because they appeared so uniquely different in every way from the big city of New Orleans and its suburbs where I grew up.

When I was traveling across the country back in the 1980s, I’d always be on the alert for places where I could see old mills. To me they are the last vestiges, along with covered bridges , of a gentler, pre-automobile age, an age about which I am hopelessly idealistic and which I romanticize as some kind of “golden age,” often choosing to ignore all the evidence of what life could be like in those raw little places out in the middle of the country.

Nevertheless, I hold onto and cherish visions of simpler times where people knew each other in their shared communities and worked to hold those places together. It’s a far cry from the sprawling, isolating cities of 21st-century America.

Years have passed since I visited a gristmill and took photographs. One memorable visit stands out. Many years ago I returned from a trip, coming back through the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I stayed that night in the town of Abingdon, and the next morning drove a few miles to White’s Mill, a beautiful old structure with a nice water wheel, fine, weathered old wood siding, and a swift mountain creek that turned the wheel. It’s also in one of the prettiest sections of rolling foothills and mountains I’ve ever seen. I immensely enjoyed the drive out to that mill and the conversation I had with owner, who was carrying on the tradition of keeping up the mill as authentically as possible.

I also liked to write stories about such places whenever I could during the years I worked on newspapers. I loved doing that kind of feature story. It was truly a step back in time and coincided with my continuing interest in U.S. history.

In my travel journal of May 8, 1984, written in Columbia Missouri, I wrote about a visit to the Ozarks region of southern Missouri and described some gristmills I had read about in a National Geographic special publication on backroads America. The scenery, the beauty of the places I visited was so striking, and was just far enough out in the country along backroads to make it appear as if the setting had not changed much in all the years since the mill had been built.

Here is that journal entry from May 1984:

I slept well last night at Smalley’s Motel in Van Buren. The day on the road started with a classic breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, toast, juice and coffee at the Float Stream Restaurant. All the locals seemed to be there talking and having their coffee.

The road to Dillard Mill had been empty, to say the least. For mile after mile the landscape could’ve been wilderness to all appearance. Not a car, house, sign, or even mailbox by the road. I zipped up and down wooded Ozark hills often with a sensation of being on a roller coaster. Finally I got back on main highways and proceeded to the state capital of Jefferson City. What a day of exploring!

I don’t think I could have appreciated or developed such a love for gristmills, their history, design, and the essential role they played in the growth and expansion of small villages and towns in the 18th and 19th centuries, had it not been for that excellent and unforgettable third grade teacher and the “Singing Wheels” reader back in 1959. Not to mention aesthetic and scenic qualities, because gristmills were invariably situated in peaceful wooded settings with streams.

Thank you to teachers everywhere who instill a love of learning in their students.

From Singing Wheels
https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/83EqEG

White’s Mill in the mountains of Southwest Virginia
https://flic.kr/p/2nxAPoV

Last updated July 12, 2022