Nice sawmill story....I am going to try and get up to see this
Problem is, if you know Vermont there is no easy way "to get theya from heya"
Volunteers resurrect sawmill for $600
August 5, 2007
By WILSON RING The Associated Press
CALAIS(Vermont) — At first glance the faded barn boards and the old rusted pipe of the Robinson Sawmill could give the impression it's just a long-abandoned mill building by a small stream waiting to be destroyed by time and the elements.
But more than two centuries after one of the town's earliest settlers dammed up a small stream near a major crossroads and built the water-powered sawmill, the roof line is straight, the metal roof shiny and the timbers sound.
About once a month during the summer, a group of local men open the sluice gate and the water fed through the pipe, known as a penstock, spins the blade on the "Lane 00 Left Hand Rotary Mill" — state of the art when it was fashioned in Montpelier in 1876 — and make some lumber.
"We may be the only mill in Vermont that can saw using waterpower, we may be the only mill that's standing in good shape," said Elliot Morse, 69, a great-great-great-grandson of Joel Robinson, the Massachusetts man who moved to Calais from Massachusetts in 1792 and built the mill in 1803.
The mill was used as a working saw mill until about 60 years ago.
Restoration work on the mill building began in the 1960s and 1970s, but no efforts were made to resurrect the machinery itself until about a decade ago when Morse was told it couldn't be done. It first cut again in 2003, the 200th anniversary of the opening of the mill.
In the world of historic preservation, reviving old equipment can costs thousands and thousands of dollars. The cost in dollars to get the Robinson Sawmill running? About $600, Morse said.
But now Morse and the others are looking for some help to keep the small mill pond from silting in completely, which would mean there wouldn't be enough water to spin the saw blade.
"Fifteen or 20 years from now there will be no pond. It will be called a wetland. When it becomes wetland you can't touch it," Morse said. "All we want to do is keep what's pond, pond."
Morse doesn't have a solid price estimate for dredging the pond, but it could be expensive.
"We're hoping someone will donate the money to dig out the pond before it turns into a wetland. We'd even be willing to put their name on a plaque."
Morse said there are other old mills left in Vermont, but most no longer have the millponds that store the water used to drive the blades.
"If there's no dam, environmentally they won't let you build another," Morse said.
Water powered mills helped carve New England out of the wilderness.
A book by the Maine State Museum says that between 1630 and 1850, thousands of sawmills sprang up along the banks of virtually every stream or river in the state with moving water. Under the common technology in use in those days, the saw blades moved straight up-and-down as the logs moved forward.
One of the last, if not the last water-powered commercial sawmill in the state was Mallett's Mill in Lee, a family-owned company that continues to do a brisk business today. Mallett's used water power from around the start of the 1900s to the 1950s, said a mill spokeswoman.
On one recent afternoon in Calais, about a dozen people set up lawn chairs outside the mill building and watched as sawyer David Newhall of Orange, who graduated from high school with Morse in 1956, rolled the logs onto the carriage that holds the logs in place as they are cut.
The carriage, driven by the water, then ran past the blade, cutting pieces until the log became square. Then the 2-inch boards were cut.
"We can saw for probably an hour and a half before we lose the water," said Newhall, who learned to run a sawmill at an uncle's mill in Middlesex. "Today is a pretty good stream. You could probably run for two hours."
The mill and about three surrounding acres are owned by the Aldrich Foundation, a nonprofit group created when the Aldrich family gave the mill and surrounding area to the community.
For decades after Robinson built the mill an up-and-down straight blade made the cuts. Then in 1876, a then state-of-the-art circular saw system was installed and it kept cutting until the 1940s, although at some point the water power was replaced with a gasoline engine, Morse said.
"It's a wonder they didn't burn the place up," Morse said.
But the dam was never breached, the mill itself, although it deteriorated, withstood the ravages of time and most of the iron equipment was never removed.
Morse enlisted the help of his friends and neighbors, many of them also Robinson descendants. They found most of the parts of the saw in the mill, or nearby, they refashioned pieces they couldn't find themselves and they got the mill running again.
The mill doesn't use a water wheel like those seen on the sides of paddle wheel boats. Rather, it uses what would today be called a turbine, whose wooden teeth mesh with the iron teeth of the gears that lead to the drive.
"The first time we started the mill, we didn't realize, I thought the teeth would just stay in the grooves, it started up and all 30 teeth floated down the brook," Morse said. "We had to find a way to make 30 more teeth, then we screwed them in with screws."
The men who run the mill are going to use the boards they cut to build a box beneath the floor to catch the sawdust so it doesn't fall into the brook.
"Then we will give it to people for their horses and things," Morse said.
