the BEACON Newspaper, Indiana beacon7-18web | Page 4

Page 4A
THE BEACON
July 2018
Feed and Lumber Mills - A Vital Component of Farm and City
Continued from page 1A
someplace in Pennsylvania
and there was an Indian in
there who was bragging about
how he had killed their father.
So they killed him, and at that
point, it was not fashionable
to kill Indians in Pennsylvania
anymore, so they both came
out West. The brother, I think,
ended up in Butler County,
Ohio and Benjamin changed
his last name to Wilson
temporarily so he couldn’t be
traced. He built a mill on what
is now called Wilson Creek
and later he was pardoned
by Pennsylvania around
1830 - and that’s on file in the
courthouse.
“I had heard that story and
I wondered how true it was,
then I came across the records
through the Symmes Purchase
and in those records when he
first came in the late 1790s he
was what was called a vol-
unteer settler. Each of those
people got 40 acres and written
on this document it says, ‘Ben-
jamin Wilson actually Walker’
Farmers in Bear Branch welcomed the opening of their
local mill in 1953, with original owners Howard Wiseman
and Harry Altoff. Photo by Robert Sommer.
right there in the records.”
In 1839, where R. E. Kaiser
Hardware in West Harri-
son, Indiana is now located,
William Briggs and John
Cheatham built a mill with a
9 ½’ diameter overshot wheel
driving 4 ½’ diameter mill-
stones. For nearly 200 years,
this and countless other mill
sites across the area weathered
dry spells only to repair and
rebuild following destructive
flooding. Current owner Rick
Kaiser says, “This brick build-
ing replaced a wood structure
The 1880s Acme Mill became the 1960s Aylor & Meyer
Feed Mill and that became today’s Aurora Feed and
Garden.
Bear Branch Supply own-
ers Chad and Jeff Pervis
are not unlike earlier millers
in that they process corn
and will custom blend
feed mixes for horses and
livestock. Photo by Robert
Sommer.
that was equal in size. They
milled anything that anybody
would have brought them.
They would have dealt with
corn, wheat, oats, barley,
anything. When this was built,
it was supposed to be the most
modern mill in Indiana; this
was in about the 1860s.
“The guy that built the brick
structure was bankrupted be-
cause a flood occurred and it
wiped out his source of power
…my great-grandfather came
down here from a general
store in Bright in 1932 and
bought it on a land contract.”
Although often located near
Grain traveled from bins
above through wooden
chutes to the mixer, ham-
mer mill and bagger scale
below. The R.E. Kaiser Mill as it
looks today. It remains a
family-owned business,
selling hardware instead of
milling services.
waterways, mills operated
not only on water power but
utilized horse and mule, as
well as human power. When
Laurel resident Ben Maple
built the first hand mill for
grinding corn in the Indiana
Territory in 1813, it is doubt-
ful he could have imagined
that in just over fifty years, the Bucky and Kerr Flouring
Mills would process as many
as 200 bushels a day.
With most milling enterprises,
the general concept is the
same. In the case of a grist
mill, grain enters the hopper,
descends through a chute then
damsel to be crushed or
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