Quick quiz: While walking near a river, you see a few stones on the riverbank. Do you (A) keep walking, (B) think, ”Hmm, some building was here” and keep walking, or (C) take pictures, do extensive research and post your results online?
For Brenda Krekeler, it’s (C) every time. Since she first learned to identify the crumbling foundations and hand-hewn planks of old mills, she has focused on preserving the buildings — or what remains of the buildings — and the local history they represent.
Her devotion to the physical remains of these once-ubiquitous businesses might baffle those inclined to put mills in a category with butter churns and button hooks — as historical artifacts (“how nice”) — and to go on to the next thing. But Krekeler sees mills as vital components of virtually all late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American communities. Sawmills were the cornerstone of any new settlement, providing lumber for houses and barns, and later, with a changeover to or the addition of a gristmill, allowing farmers to turn their grain crops into valuable products. A town’s miller tended to be a business and civic leader, supported and trusted by his customers, Krekeler said. A successful miller meant a successful town.
Now, Krekeler said, the buildings have been abandoned.
“Unfortunately, unless they are maintained, they are collapsing, falling into the river, fires … falling into ruin,” she said.
Krekeler became interested in mill preservation while working on a book about covered bridges (Covered Bridges Today, Daring Books, 1989). Today, as president of the Great Lakes chapter of the national Society for the Preservation of Old Mills (SPOOM), she tracks down as many mills as possible, not just in her chapter’s area but also in Kentucky and other regions, including the South, where she’s helping to form a new SPOOM chapter.
Krekeler takes photographs and learns what she can of a mill’s history: who built it, who owned it, and what happened to it through the years. Catastrophe was common; wooden gristmills often burned, thanks in part to the fine particulates that filled the air after flour was ground.
Krekeler isn’t out to save every old mill in America. Sometimes, it’s enough to maintain what remains of a former bustling business. Delaware County’s Bieber Mill is one such site.
Bieber Mill, also called the Wigton Mill after a later owner, was built on the banks of the Olentangy River in 1844. After considerable success (and after changing hands several times), it burned, probably after 1923. An attached wooden gristmill caught fire first, and the resulting conflagration gutted the interior of the adjacent limestone building.
The remains — a spectacular, five-story shell — now are owned by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Years ago, the ODNR proposed tearing down the mill, which was in danger of collapsing. Vandals were attracted to the site, and graffiti marred its walls. Delaware writer, activist, and local historian Judi Brozek, who provided Krekeler with the history of the mill found on the SPOOM website, protested the DNR’s plan to raze what remained of the mill and eventually wrote and received an Ohio Arts Council grant to stabilize the site. Brozek said ideas about including the mill in a proposed educational center were discussed but ultimately dropped, and the mill, while visible from both Chapman Road and across the river on Ohio St. Rte. 315, remains off-limits to visitors.
Sometimes Krekeler is happily surprised. She recalled visiting a decrepit Fairfield County gristmill in the early 1990s. The mill, built in 1824 above the Hocking River Falls, was in such desperate shape that when she and her husband returned in 2010, she expected the mill to be gone. (Of Ohio’s more than 60 mills, Krekeler counts 16 that have faded away altogether.)
This story, however, has a different ending. They arrived in Fairfield County to find the beautifully restored Rock Mill, saved from extinction by the efforts of skilled craftsmen, volunteers, and the Fairfield County Historical Parks. Work continues to make the mill fully operational.
SPOOM, Fey said, “has done a commendable job of doing what an organization of this type should do: It has brought together people of similar interests and skills and provided those of us who need resources and guidance in such an endeavor the opportunity — and I hate to say this — to not need to reinvent the wheel.”
Krekeler, an adjunct geography professor based in Cincinnati, said she and her husband, Mike, spend their summers traveling to new mills and revisiting old ones.
“We try to follow up and see how they’re doing if they aren’t owned privately,” she said. “I’ve pretty much comprehensively found all the mills in Ohio.”
Great Lakes SPOOM’s roughly 80 members meet in spring and fall. The fall meeting is set for Oct. 20-23 in Greenville, Ohio. Membership is $10 a year.
Also on the SPOOM website, various grains including flour and cornmeal are for sale. Krekeler mentioned that she buys her cornmeal from the Bridgeton Mill in Indiana, whose many products include blue cornmeal.
“Now when we have cornmeal muffins, they’re blue,” she said.
For more information, visit www.spoom.org, click on “Chapters,” then click on “Great Lakes chapter.”
