Lost in time’s decay
Old mill full of history
Winter water flows
***
Painting done in acrylics mostly with a pallet knife – Dwight L. Roth
Lost in Time
Old Mill
Fishing
There is an old mill in Dayton, Virginia where young boys liked to go and fish next to the big wheel. In the early 1970s I started developing and printing my own black and white photos. I went by to take a few photos of the old mill and found these young boys fishing in the mill stream. They became the perfect accessories to the mill. I loved the simplicity of it all when I look at these shots.
Old mill long standing silent by the stream
Mill stones no longer grinding corn
Giant wheel stuck in memories of the past
Mill pond remains full // water still flows
Potential energy moves on down stream
Young boys find a sweet spot near the big wheel
Long poles reach out over the water
Lost in the moment they wait for a bite
Fishing for the living next to the dead
B&W Photos: Dwight L. Roth
Mill Stories
I am republishing these two stories of my father-in-law Paul White’s stories of his childhood in 1935. The photos I posted yesterday all connect with this mill. I am going to put these real time photos into his stories to help give you a real picture of what he was experiencing. If you have a good imagination you can visualize what was taking place in his stories. As you can see somethings have changed since 1935!
11.Playing in Grandpa Snavely’s Mill
Grandpa Hurst was a miller before I knew him. Grandpa White was a train conductor, but I never knew him. Grandpa Snavely was a miller also. I never really learned to know him because he never talked to his grandchildren. He was sort of a loner and did not converse much with anyone. He owned a large stone gristmill along the Hammer Creek. Hammer Creek was so named because a hundred years ago or more there was a forge upstream from the mill.
First, let me tell you about the old mill along the Brunnerville-Clay Road. It still stands today (1992) ( and also 2017), but when I was a boy in 1935 it was already closed up and the machinery removed. The mill was three or four stories high and had wide expanses of hardwood flooring. The windows were all intact so it was well preserved. It was later converted into apartments.
Across the road is an old farm where my stepmother was born and where she spent her childhood, until her family moved upstream about a mile to the better mill.
The farmstead had a whitewashed two and a half story stone house that was rather small for such a family. Attached was a large, never painted, wash house summer kitchen.
Nearby was an old bank barn which was never painted and looked sort of black, especially when it rained. Uncle Charles Hollinger and Aunt Katie lived there with their family. When we visited Russel and Pearl and Jean and David, I sometimes went into the old mill or walked along the bank of the creek, but not often.
I learned to know about the Snavely Mill when my father married my stepmother in 1934. It was a prosperous place and was in operation for a very long time. The mill had a reputation for manufacturing very fine flour.
They also had two portable hammer mills mounted on trucks and four men went from farm to farm grinding cowfeed or “chop” for the farmer’s cattle.
The four and a half story stone building was very attractive and in complete repair. Behind it was a metal-clad granary about four stories high.
The Snavely family often came together for Sunday Dinner or just to visit. I think that may have happened because aunts: Nora, Jenny, and Anna still lived at home. With them lived a cousin Warren Snavely and a worker Lloyd Wideman.
When we went to visit them, there were many cousins and many interesting things to do. We could take walks along the dam or go swimming in the race. In the winter we went sledding down the road at a really high speed. Now I think it was very dangerous, but we grandchildren had such good times.
Many times after our big Sunday dinner, my cousins and I would play hide and seek in the mill. It is surprising that none of us ever got hurt. I think we all realized there were dangers there to avoid.
Grandpa Snavely also had a player piano. That seemed like a modern thing. They had many player rolls which could be loaded into the piano to make it play different songs.
A special time each summer was when everyone came home for “Snapper Soup!” Snapping turtles lived in the dam and if you put a stick in the water and teased them they would bite the stick and hang on. Only the uncles did that!
Another yearly event was when we went to see the night cactus bloom. It only bloomed once a year and did its blooming at night.
Beside their house were three unusual trees. They were persimmon trees, which were not very common in Pennsylvania. We tried tasting them once, but never again!!
Boat Rides on the Mill Pond
Grandpa Snavely’s gristmill was picturesque and so was the mill pond we called “the dam.” The mill was a four and a half story limestone building of good size, with a slate roof. I wish I could remember which year it was built, but it was old and had hardwood floors throughout.
The dam was wide and tapered down to twenty feet wide at the narrow end. It reached up and around the curve to the floodgates which could divert high water when a flood came.
In the winter we grandchildren sometimes went skating, but not very often. Perhaps once each summer or every other summer the grandchildren wanted to ride in Grandpa’s old wide bottom red and white boat which was always docked under the chicken house, which extended about ten feet over the water. There was always supposed to be a responsible adult along.
On a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon, about ten or twelve children climbed into the boat and we rowed up from the dam. I was about eleven at the time. I sat on the edge, the gunwale. The smaller children sat on the bench boards in the middle. No one had life jackets. Maybe they weren’t invented yet?
We were going slowly along the bank and the person up front, who was supposed to guide it, let it bump a lump of ground. The boat stopped immediately, and I rolled off into the water! I was scared and flailed about until someone grabbed my arm and pulled me up into the boat.
They said I was yelling, “Help me! Help me!!”
I climbed onto the bank all dripping wet and walked back around the pond to the house. I was embarrassed about it and just a little disgusted at whoever was supposed to be guiding the boat.
Stories by Paul H. White from his book … Growing up in Ephrata Pennsylvania
Photos: Dwight L. Roth
Tell your story
Let it roll from your mind like an avalanche
Mighty and intense
Driven by unstoppable forces
Knowing that if not you
No one
Will ever know the depth of joy and pain
Roth Poetry 