Sunday, we went down to Weston for the Jackson’s Mill Jubilee. It’s part craft fair, part Civil War reenactments, and part trying to entice people to come back to Lewis County.

Aside from, once again, recognizing how happy I am to live in the future and not in the past, the best part was going through the mill.

It’s a working mill, and unlike other mill’s we’ve seen, you can wander through the entire building–there is just a rope to keep you from getting to close to the whirling gears, which could certainly do some damage.

Here is the pond, and the apparatus that allows them to control the flow of water into the mill. Yes, it’s simply a board that lifts up, controlled by a lever from inside the mill.

Looking out from the mill, towards the pond, you can see the water flowing down the chute into the mill. Along the left side of the chute, you can see the rope that controls the water flow.

Here are the gears in motion, when water was moving through the mill (and they were grinding corn above)

Here are the same gears at rest:

You can see that the wheel is spinning freely–the gears/mechanism it would be connected into is pulled away. In the picture below of the grinding stone, this is beneath the grind stone that has been flipped over to display it’s grinding surface. To turn the stone, the two wheels would be meshed together.

Here, water is flowing down–the light area in the back is where the water is going. In the foreground you can see the gear whirring.

And here it is at rest.

Here is a grind stone that is not in use–it’s upside down so you can see the grinding face.

Here you see that the mill could have had three stones grinding at once, but only one is in use.

And here’s the mill from the outside. I was standing beside the pond when I took the picture.

There are, of course, more pictures if you click through to Flickr.

Lots and lots of stuff there that fascinated me.