WILMOT MILL
Welcome to Wilmot Mill, Wilmot, Indiana on the Tippicanoe River. This is a working 12 foot overshot water-wheel grist mill employing 42" buhr stones. The mill grinds organic hard and soft wheat, rye and corn into whole grain flour. There is a large Millpond across the highway from the Mill. Check out the Pond water rushing over the weir into the River!
photo by The Lead Dog
In 1840, Jacob Ryder established a dam and a water-powered saw mill and grist mill to support a growing settler community. The mill operated within the family for years, until burning to the ground in the 1930's.
In 1939 a barn from the original homestead was relocated to a new foundation near the waterway and established as a feed mill. The barn is an early example of sawn-timber barn construction (expensive sawn-timber was usually reserved for homes). The mill was operated using an underwater turbine and then with gasoline power for almost forty years. When the business closed its doors, the structure fell into disrepair.
Retired teachers took on the job of a lifetime in the early 1980's when they bought the mill and refurbished it timber by timber and piece by piece. Interior walls were made up of siding salvaged from barns torn down. It took a painstaking three-year search to find a set of 2500 pound stones and a water wheel for the mill.
Wilmot Mill, today, operates much as it would have when first established in the 1840's. Borrowing water from Wilmot Pond, the overshot water wheel thunderously does the work to make flour and meal.
WATER WHEEL
In her Old Mill Cookbook, former Mill owner, Patricia Templeton Johnson, writes a beautiful preface which details the history of Wilmot Mill. She writes, "Old mill history survives because people love old mills. The romance of age makes the tinkle of water over the old wheels a piper's call to those who admire the courage of pioneers that survived the wilderness and made it produce. The surge of water and the groan of the wheel revive memories of a brave people wresting the land from swamp and forest to raise families on the fruit of that land. Wilmot Mill is a part of those dreams for it was built before the land was cleared or the forest gone from Northern Indiana."
The cache container is small and black. BYOP.THE CACHE IS NOT LOCATED ON MILL PROPERTY. YOU NEED NOT STAND IN THE ROAD TO ACCESS THE CACHE. Park with extreme care. As always, please be respectful, and cache in, trash out. .
DON'T BE FOOLED BY CHINTZY IMITATIONS!! None genuine without this official SixDogTeam seal. 35mm photographs taken by Lead Dog, copyright 2005 by RikSu Outfitters unless otherwise noted. (Photos taken with 1970 Mamiya-Sekor 500DTL SLR) We are the SixDogTeam and we approve of this cache.
