If you’ve been reading along, you know that my friends and I spent a gorgeous October day at Washington’s Grist Mill, on Dogue Run Creek, 3 miles southwest of Mount Vernon.  The current mill is actually a reconstruction of the mill that Washington built in 1771 to replace one his father built on the same spot forty years earlier. 

At Washington’s grist mill, wheat flour and corn meal were made for the plantation, and a super-fine flour was made for export to Europe and the West Indies.  The mill’s power supply came, then and now, from water that is diverted into Dogue Run Creek from Piney Branch, above the mill.  The additional waterflow significantly increases the mill’s production capacity. 

My friends and I also investigated a nearby threshing building.  The round, two-story building, built into the side of a small hill, was constructed with a central post.  Horses walked up a short ramp to the building’s upper level, where the floors were covered with large amounts of cut wheat stalks.  The horses were tethered to the central post.  As they trotted around the post, the stalks broke apart and the straw and chaff became separated from the grain, which slipped through spaces between the floorboards down to the lower level.  Trotting (instead of walking) kept the grain cleaner by preventing horses from passing waste as they moved.  Behind the building, ground level doors opened to rising mounds of whole grain, which were then collected and brought to the mill for grinding. 

Washington’s grist mill, for which Oliver Evans was awarded U.S. Patent No. 3, is the only operating “Oliver Evans Automated Milling System” in America.  Power is supplied by a 16-foot water wheel whose spinning motion turns the shafts, gears, and belts that propel the machinery.  Elevators move the grain vertically between the floors in small buckets attached to an endless belt running inside a closed shaft.  The small buckets dump their contents into a hopper, or container, which sits directly above two large, horizontal millstones.  Grain drops slowly into a central hole leading to the tiny space between the millstones, where it is ground into flour.  If the operator chooses, the freshly ground flour may then be moved into a long, rectangular sieve that retains the coarser materials and allows only the smallest, finest particles of flour to pass through.

Washington’s mill produced a finer, drier flour than had ever before been made.  Previously, hard-wheat milling produced a coarse, brown flour that retained the bran, with its essential nutrients, but Washington’s new automated mill produced a bran-less, superfine flour that was much lighter.  Unfortunately, without its bran it was also less nutritious. 

Washington’s horse-driven threshing house, combined with Oliver Evans’s extraordinary automatic mill, dramatically increased the availability of grain and flour.  The improved efficiency allowed many more people to be fed with less work.  Bread and flour, both coarse and fine, could now be obtained with comparatively little human energy. 

We were starting down a road whose destination we could not see.  At a certain point, the benefits of increasing the quantity of food are outweighed by compromises to the quality of that food.  It would be a couple of centuries before we would reach that point.

For now, Washington and Oliver Evans had figured out how to substitute horsepower and water power for elbow grease. 
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