Travels, SUUSI, 2009

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Thursday I had signed up for a full day trip to Marbry Mill. It is a historic reservation maintained by the U.S. park department along the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway. We left about 10AM in the van (shown above) and then had a really nice drive through scenic Virginia (above, here and below).	=0=
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As you can see above, the mill itself has three sections, the center of which was the common mill for grinding corn. To the left (in that view) is the machine shop and to the right is a lumber mill. Mr. Marbry arrived with his wife in the area about 1898 without any savings to speak of. Mr. Marbry worked as a blacksmithn until he earned enough to build the initial mill. Then his wife mostly ran the mill while he worked as a blacksmith and then built the additions. The mill was abandoned about 1936 when his wife died (he had died earlier), but was restored in 1945 as a part of the park. Here you can see the water wheel from the window of the mill (it was not well lit). Below is the machine shop (to the right of the entrance) and the lumber mill (to the left of the entrance).	=0=
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Before Mr. Marbry built the mill, his meighbors warned him that there wouldn't be enough water to run a mill. He relied on two streams and a pond and even so there was barely enough water. The current water wheel, show here in a short video leaks and so they only run the griniding mill a couple of times a day as demonstrations. Shown above is the hopper where corn kernels are dribbled down the center of the top stone to be ground. Also above is the clutch which releases or holds the drive from the waterwheel (on the right) with the drive wheel for the mill. There were several other restored historical buildings including a log cabin (like the one which the Marbry's would have lived in initially, but they replaced it with a frame house once they had a lumber mill and the house below was moved from another location). Inside the log cabin (with milled lumber for the floors) and a roof of split shingles (no need for a mill) was a loom for weaving. There were four park rangers at the site, but the other three were older men in historic costume while the ranger at the loom was in the more traditional park ranger uniform.	=0=
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