Jenny and I still aren’t feeling well. This is probably one of the last weekends that we have to see the fall leaves, though, so we decided to take a short drive. I randomly chose to take the red belt out of New Kensington, and then head north on Route 19 for a little bit. I figured that would give us a decent, manageable drive through some wooded areas. A little way up Route 19, I realized that we were getting pretty close to McConnell’s Mill State Park, and I thought that would make some great pictures. Also, Jenny and I had been to the park several weeks ago, but it was really hot and the park was pretty busy, so we didn’t get to stop down to the actual mill part of the park. We decided to make that our endpoint for today’s drive.
1160 McConnell’s Mill is actually an old grain mill on Slippery Rock Creek. It is named after the last family to operate it as a mill, but it was a mill long before the McConnells’ invested in it and took over operations in the latter part of the 19th century. The mill was “modernized” under the McConnells, with the transition to water turbine-powered workings from a water wheel, and conversion to rolling grinding mills from the older rotary mills (rolling grinding mills pinch the grain between two rollers, effectively grinding it, while rotary mills use circular grinding stones to grind the grain–the circular mill stones used for decoration in a lot of places now are from rotary mills). Rolling mills are far more efficient and easier to maintain, and yield a better grinding in less time.
1182 The mill had the capability to grind multiple crops. Besides just wheat, it also did buckwheat, corn, I think something else (memory failing!). The mill produced flours and animal feed through different grinding processes. When the McConnells modernized it, they essentially automated the entire process. The raw grain brought by a farmer was weighed, then put into a processing hopper. From there, sets of conveyors and other automated machinery took the grain from raw to fully-processed in about 1/2 hour. The miller would usually keep 1/8 of the raw grain as payment. Neat stuff.
Jenny and I had a good time today. We got to see a bunch of nice leaves. Things had pretty much already changed and many of the leaves had already fallen by the time we got to the mill, but it was a fun day anyway. More pictures here!
jonathan
