CHAPTER 6
The Gristmill
Sam and Dorp went from the man’s shirt into the car’s cloth upholstery.
They stayed there until arriving
in Childersburg, Alabama.
The family stopped at the grandparents’
farm on the way home to give them an update on their other son in
Oklahoma.
The kids talked grandma out of ice cream. Dad told the kids
to first go to the sweet corn patch and pick a few ears to cook when
they got home.
About that time, Sam and Dorp evaporated out of the
car upholstery and went into the air. They drifted over to a river
with an old building sitting near it.
“It’s
good to be out again,” said Sam as he stretched a little. (Does
water really stretch, or was I just seeing things?)
“Look,
Sam! Here is something I had hoped to show you, an old gristmill.
This is the Kymulga Grist Mill.”
“Yup,
I know what a mill is,” Sam said, “We went through a flour mill
in Kansas. What about this gristmill?
“The English word 'mill' is the Spanish word; el
molino, the French word; le
moulin,
and the Italian word; il mulino.
The words sound a lot alike, don’t they? The ‘grist’ is the
kernel of wheat that has been stripped from its chaff. The chaff is the outer
shell that acts like a raincoat. A gristmill then grinds the grist into flour.
Most gristmills in America
were water-powered, though there were wind-powered gristmills. There
is a wind-powered mill in Elkhorn, Iowa, not far from your
grandparents. But all water-powered mills, use the same basic parts and
the same laws of physics by turning electromagnetic power into
mechanical power.”
“Wait
a minute, Mr. Dorp! Electromagnetic power? I thought we were talking about waterpower here.”
“We
are, but pay close attention, Sam. Gravity is what makes water flow
downhill, and gravity is created by the earth’s electromagnetic
fields. So then, the science of watermills begins in the earth’s
electromagnetic fields. These electromagnetic fields create gravity,
from the higher elevations of the earth to lower elevations. As the
water…”
“Whoa!”
Sam interrupted. “A gristmill needs two fields; the crop field that
provides the grain, and the electromagnetic field, which supplies the
gravity that moves the water. HA!
“Clever,
Sam; yes, the gravity pulls the water towards the seas and humans
channel it down a chute, where it goes across a water wheel, with
built-in boxes to hold water, which makes one side heavier than the
other side. The heavy side is pulled by gravity, which turns the
water wheel. As long as water keeps coming into one side of the
wheel, it will keep turning and turn the main shaft that goes into
the mill house."
"There is gear-work inside the building, which
controls the upper millstone. The turning upper millstone rotates
against the stationary lower millstone. When grain is poured between
them, the grain is ground, and then is bagged for transport.
This is
similar to what happened to us in Garden City.”
“Wait.
That’s also what birds do with their gizzards. So a gristmill is
like a chicken eating corn?
Wow. I wonder how a fried millstone would
taste. Ha!”
“You
have an unusual perspective, Sam. I have a riddle for you. How many
girls will you find in a water-powered gristmill?”
“I
don’t know."
“No.”
Dorp replied. “Look it up when you get home but use the phrase 'gristmill
damsel'. ‘Damsel’
is a French word for a girl.
Anyway, when a farmer brought in grain to be ground, the miller kept a percent of the
grain he processed, called the
miller’s fee, as payment
for his services. He would then trade or sell that grain to make his
business profitable.”
“So
that’s where that saying comes from. When I go to Grandma Tessie’s and get ice cream,
Grandpa Ed will get a spoon and take a bite of my
ice cream. Then he says ‘Miller’s fee, kiddo’.”
“Correct,
Sam. The miller’s fee was common in America from Colonial times,
all the way up till World War II. This
is called bartering: exchanging services or items of like value
without using money.
This
made Sam think, “I wonder; how many ways did the old-timers use
water that we don’t use it now, beside growing food and cleaning
things?”
“Good
question Sam. Let’s think. How did Columbus get to America in 1492?
“
"He
got here by ship. But he used wind power, not waterpower. And he got
3,500 miles to the galleon. Ha!”
“Cute,
but only partially true. Put a sail on your picnic table and see if
the table moves. Sailing ships move on water because the water allows
the ships to slip through it. The water is as important to a ship as
the wind. This is because water and all liquids generate less
friction than solids like dirt or rocks, and a huge ship can move
through water far easier than a picnic table can move across a lawn.”
Dorp
continued, “Colonial America had a higher percentage of artisans and craftsmen than
modern America does.
Most occupations needed water to complete their
work. Animal skins were worn by many people up to the 21st
century, and humans still wear animal skins in the form of leather
shoes.
Water is needed for the chemical baths that turn raw animal
hides into tanned hides and leather.
Hats were very important items
in America before automobiles with reliable heaters. Many types of
hats required glue as well as stitches of thread to hold them
together. Glue was and still is made by boiling down scraps of animal
hides and bones in water."
"Many trades in early America used other
kinds of glues. Wallpaper paste was made by mixing powdered flour with water.
“Wood
was the major source of heat through the Civil War and beyond. This
left a lot of wood ashes to be cleaned out of stoves and fireplaces." Water was poured through containers of wood ashes, to release a
substance called lye,
which was then mixed with cooked animal fat to make lye
soap."
Lye
was also produced in mass quantities by homesteaders. As they claimed
new land, they would clear the trees, and burn the wood they didn’t
need to build houses, barns and fences. They would then leach the lye
out of the wood ashes using water, then cook the extra water out of
the ‘soup’, leaving potash. The money made from selling the
potash nearly equaled the price of a hired man to chop down the trees
from the land. Potash is now called caustic
soda, on the opposite end of the pH scale from acid. Potash was and
is a valuable chemical and is used to make glass and other things.
"Oh yes. Sam, even though we
weren’t going to speak about food or cleaning, the lye derived from
washing wood ashes was also used to preserve food. For example,
hominy
is corn that has been treated with lye.”
Sam
spoke: “Grandpa Ed likes hominy. Me? Not so much unless I can put
BBQ sauce on it.”
“Hmm.
The Native Americans used lye to treat their corn and were healthy.
When white people tried to eat corn without lye treatment, many
contracted a disease called pellagra,
which is a deficiency of the vitamin niacin.
When is corn treated with lye, it releases the niacin so the human
body can absorb it.
“Isn’t
corn meal and polenta
the same thing?” Sam asked. “Grandpa Ed says mom didn’t like
corn mush when she was a kid, but now she buys polenta, which is just
corn mush with a fancy name.”
Dorp
agreed with Grandpa Ed. “They are essentially the same product.
Polenta is the Italian name. Your Grandpa Ed feeds you fried mush
with butter and syrup for breakfast, doesn’t he?
“Yessir.
Not as good as pancakes, but dad says I would eat sawdust if it had
syrup on it.”
“I
suspect he is correct, Sam. Now let’s talk about water use with
early construction methods. From digging a foundation trench for an
ancient pyramid to setting piers on an ocean coast, water is the
perfect leveler. Calm water is always level.
From the first metal
workers to modern blacksmithing, water has been necessary to temper
metal, to give it the right strength or hardness for special uses.
Water was also used by those who built wheels for wagons and stagecoaches. The blacksmith would heat the iron tire to make it larger, then fit the iron tire over the wood wheel, then pour water over the hot iron
to shrink it into place and keep the wooden wheel from catching
fire.
Even the making of iron used water. Some large air bellows,
which made the fire hot enough to melt the iron ore, were powered by
water wheels.”
“Really?”
Sam got excited. “That’s a good riddle. How can water be used to
melt iron ore? With water-powered bellows.
I’ll win the riddle
contest at school this year with that one.”
“Very
good Sam. Water was also used to make barrels, yesteryear’s storing and
shipping container for liquids, flours and small items, like nails.
Barrels were more popular than crates or wooden boxes, because
barrels could be rolled while boxes had to be carried. It is easier
to roll a 100-pound barrel of nails than to carry a 100-pound box of
nails. Part of the barrel making process (called coopering) uses
steam to shape boards called staves
into curved pieces to give
barrels their proper shape.”
“Also,
water was and is used to liquefy products so they can be shaped into
desired products items.
For example, writing paper used to be made
out of linen, cloth and wool cast-offs. The Declaration of
Independence and
the US Constitution were written on such materials. Papermakers had assistants who would go out and harvest old rags and
scraps of cloth. These rags would be beaten to shreds, and then
soaked in water to make a soupy mix. A special screen-mold would be
dipped into the vat and a thin layer of the rag slurry would be
deposited on the screen. This product would then be dried, polished
and become paper.”
“I
thought paper was made of ground-up wood fiber.”
“It
is today,” Dorp explained. “But wood pulp was not used for making
printing paper until the Civil War. The first official American
document printed on wood paper may have been The
Emancipation Proclamation of
1863.
And even the printer needed water to do his job because the
old inks were made with water.”
"Water
is often used to create things that repel water. For example, bricks
are meant to keep out rain, snow and other weather, but water is
needed to making bricks and mortar. Clay bricks were made in the
early days by digging clay, mixing it with enough water to make in
moldable, then forming it into a specific size, letting them
dry, and then baking them at a high temperature, burning off the
organic material in the brick, which made it fairly weatherproof."
"Odd, don’t you think? This is the same way pottery is made. One of
the most interesting aspects of colonial brick construction was the
formula for the mortar that held the bricks together. The colonial
artisans would burn oyster shells to extract the lime, which would
then be made into used a lime and sand-based mortar. And oysters are
grow in …?” Dorp led the question.
“Water.”
Sam knew oysters lived in water.
Dorp
continued; “Even modern concrete, which saves humans from muddy
roads, uses water. Wet concrete becoming hard is not only a matter of the
concrete drying out. Concrete gets hard because of a chemical
reaction between the water and the ingredients of the concrete.
”
Let
us not overlook the role of water in White people settling the west.
First, Lewis and Clark traveled a lot by water.
Second, gold strikes
are often found around water. Water was absolutely necessary for most
prospectors to mine gold, either when panning gold, or by using
sluice lines for higher production.
The
gold rushes brought people out west to new territories. Though most
prospectors failed at finding large amounts of gold, many of these
failed prospectors fell in love with the land.
We know that many
people went west on wagon trains, which needed water for the animals
that pulled the wagons.
And steam engines not only powered locomotives but were eventually attached to
electric generators to light cities, with each city having its own
generator. Steam boilers also heated large buildings in these cities.
Farming was also advanced by steam engine tractors, which could till
larger tracts of land than horses in the same amount of time.
Sam
spoke up: “My Grandpa Ed took me to a Thresher’s Reunion in Mt Pleasant, Iowa. I saw
inside the firebox of a steam tractor, and the front of the machine
opened up to show the fire tubes. I got to watch them run. They moved really slowly. I think Abby could outrun one with her shoelaces untied. But they can scream louder than she does when she falls down.
They had whistles on them just like the trains in the old movies.”
“That’s
because the whistle is powered by the steam from the boiler, just
like the trains were. It sounds like your grandpa taught you about
steam power. It’s quite interesting to see how a little iron, a
little coal or wood, and a little water can do so much work that used
to be done by horses, oxen, by wind or water, or by the human hand.”
“My
great-great grandpa was a boiler man in the early 1900s, so grandpa
knows a lot about it. So, people went from doing things by hand, to
using animals, to water and wind power, to steam power then to
gasoline engines and now to solar, wind and waterpower again?”
“Very
good Sam. The desire for a better life requires increased production
with less human labor. Water has always been a component in human
endeavor.”
“And
finally, let’s not forget the lowly water bottle, when filled with
hot water, calmed the aching muscles of workers and helped them get a
good night’s sleep. Early hot water bottles were made of metal or
earthenware. The modern, flexible, rubber hot water bottle was
invented after rubber technology was developed to make car tires.
A
Polish citizen named Slavoljub Eduard Penkala patented the new design
in 1903. His father was Polish and his mother was Dutch. An early
name for the hot water bottle was ‘a
Dutch mother.’”
“Sam,
what do you think people did before indoor plumbing was available?”
“Outhouses
and windmills,” Sam said.
“You
know about those?” Dorp asked.
“My
Grandpa Ed still has one of each on his farm in Iowa.”
“Yes.
In the old days, each village had a common well that people would
draw water from. Usually, it was the children that fetched the water.
In small towns, most every house had its own outhouse. In big cities,
apartment houses had communal toilets in the back of the lot, near the alley. They
sprinkled lime in the pit to reduce the odors. When the pit under the
outhouse was full, the owner would either dig a new hole and
resituate the outhouse or hire a man with a ‘honey wagon’ to
empty the pit. The honey (human manure) would be unloaded in a farmer’s field
nearby, if there were no broken bottles in the load.”
Sam
grimaced. “What a yucky job. I’m afraid to ask what people used
for toilet paper back then.”
“It
depended on who you were.” Dorp said. “King Henry VIII had weavers to
weave cloth that he used for toilet paper. Common people used large
plant leaves, corncobs, and catalogs; most anything that would work.
And the man who emptied outhouse pits? His wife had to wash his
overalls on a washboard because they had no electricity or wash
machine back then. Aren’t you glad you live now? What does your
grandpa keep for toilet paper in his outhouse?”
“For
a joke, he keeps a corncob on a string, nailed to the wall of the
outhouse, but keeps toilet paper there too.
He has the outhouse in
case the electricity goes out or if the well quits working.
Oh, I
have an outhouse joke. Grandpa Ed told me this one.
"John and Bill
were using the 2-hole outhouse at the same time. Bill accidently
dropped a fifty-cent piece down his hole in the board. So then, he
threw in his pocket watch and billfold too.
‘Why did you do that,’
asked John?
‘Well, Bill, I’m sure not diving in there for just
fifty cents.”
“Oh
my!” grimaced Dorp. Even a dorp thought that joke was peculiar.
“Outhouses weren’t like modern bathrooms, they only had two
purposes; to use the toilet, and to get children out of doing the
dishes after supper.”
“What
do you mean outhouses were used to get out of doing the dishes?”
“Well
Sam, when children were assigned to help with the dishes, would claim
they needed to use the toilet, then go to the outhouse and tarry
there until they thought the dishes were washed and put away. This
phenomenon was called ‘dish-towel
diarrhea.’ Your Grandma
Tessie played that very trick on her mother.”
“Really?
Mr. Dorp? Why do outhouses have moons on them?”
Dorp
explained, “Outhouses obviously need fresh air. Builders put air
holes both in the front and the back. The front holes were decorative
to pretty up the place. Farmers with large families often needed two outhouses. The men’s outhouse had a star in the front, and the
women’s outhouse had a moon. This was a handy sign for people who
couldn’t read.”
“Then
why don’t we see pictures of outhouses with stars on them?”
“Frankly,
Sam, women took better care of the moon-houses than men took care of
the star-houses, so the women’s outhouses lasted longer than the
men’s outhouses. The women would use leftover wallpaper to decorate
their outhouses and put little rugs on the floor. They often kept
them quite nice.”
Sam
puzzled, “You talk like you’ve been in a few of them?”
“As
a water molecule, Sam, it’s part of the job.”
It
was Sam’s turn to grimace. “That’s a job I hope I
don’t get. Girls’ restrooms - Yuk!
Anyway, I have a story Grandma
Tessie told us:
Her niece brought potato salad a family reunion, but
none of the older people would eat it. This hurt her feelings. Later
one of the older women asked where she got the dish she used. She said she got it at an antique store. The older
woman told her it was a chamber pot, that people kept under the bed
and used when they needed to go #1 at night. The niece was very
embarrassed and almost threw up when she realized what she had been
eating from.”
“Yes.
If they needed to go #1 at night, they could use the chamber pot, but
if they needed to go #2, some people used the pot, but some people used the outhouse”. Dorp
continued. "So, what
happened to the chamber pot?”
“It
became a flowerpot, Mr. Dorp.”
“That’s
probably best. Humans' minds are very scientific at times. A clean pot is safe no matter what it used to hold.”
Dorp
then told Sam more about life in America, before the advent of
piped-in city water.
After a time, individual wells became more
popular that the communal well. Holes were dug and the sides were
lined with stone or brick, which would allow groundwater to seep into
the well cavity where buckets and later lever-powered pumps were used
to draw the water. Some houses channeled the rainwater off the roofs
via gutters, into underground cisterns, and a smaller device called a
pitcher pump would draw water at the kitchen sink without having to
go outside.
Sam
said, “That water wouldn’t be very clean if it was washed off
roofs, where the birds sat.”
“That’s
true, Dorp agreed, “but most surface water isn’t pure Sam. The
most fortunate people were those who had a spring on their property.
A spring is an underground stream that spills above ground, so it is
fairly pure. Not only was the water good, but it was also cold, and farmers
would build ‘spring houses.’ These were small buildings that were
cooled by the cold water and helped keep milk, butter, cream, and
other foods chilled until they could be used on the farm or taken to
town and bartered at the general store for other products.
Oh,
look, Sam. We’ve drifted quite aways, nearly to Talladega, and
we’re coming down.”
“Hey!
Is that a raspberry patch? They’re stickery. I learned that the
hard way, at Grandpa Harry’s place.”
“Trial
and terror?” Dorp asked.
“You
know it. I fell face-first into the patch. Grandpa had to lift me out
by my back pockets. I even got stabbed in my armpits. Zowzie!”
The
cool of the evening brought them down onto a raspberry in Mr. and
Mrs. Akin’s back yard. Early the next morning, Mrs. Akins picked a
pan of berries to make into a local treat called Cornmeal Cookies.
She and her husband had a silly joke they would tell each other.
When
one would have to bend over a lot in a day, they would complain to
the other: “Oh, my Akin (Achin’) back.”
Anyway, their son was
working in Chicago for a dredging company, doing ship repairs as a
welder.
She missed him and hoped he would move back home once he got
the traveling bug out of his system, but time would tell…
Photo: kymulga.annistonstar
CHAPTER 6