BROOKNEAL, Va. (AP) — The past, with some new parts, is being restored in Hat Creek, Campbell County’s oldest community.
Harper’s Mill, which supplied flour and corn meal to settlers in the colonial era and survived at least two floods to keep operating in the 20th century, is coming back to life.
A wooden water wheel and its components are being installed by current owners Pat and Steve Elder, with the services of Lynchburg millwright Ben Hassett.
Hassett’s company built the wooden wheel and designed its metal hub, shaft and gears.
“He’s going to hook it up so it will operate,” Pat Elder said.
The Elders are hoping the rather small mill will attract visitors, if only a few of them.
“Hat Creek doesn’t have a lot going for it,” because it’s a rural area of former tobacco farms about five miles north of Brookneal, Pat Elder said.
The Elders have launched a bed-and-breakfast venture at their home, naming it for Harper’s Mill.
The mill restoration, however, is intended to complement the community’s other features instead of their low-key B&B business, Pat Elder said.
The Elders are hoping the mill can be a field-trip destination for schoolchildren studying history, and also that it also will attract visitors among the clienteles of the nearby Sans Soucy Vineyard and the Hat Creek Golf Course.
Red Hill plantation, Patrick Henry’s last home, also is nearby.
The Elders plan to make animal feed in the mill, grinding corn with millstones that survive from the mill’s active years a century ago.
The resulting meal “won’t be for human consumption,” Pat Elder said. “That requires too many health inspectors.”
However, “chickens have come back,” she said, and many people now have a couple of dozen hens in their back yards. They’ll be consumers for the mill’s products, Elder hopes.
Pat Elder said she grew up in Charlotte County and has been familiar with Harper’s Mill for many years.
She and her husband lived in several places during his military career, she said, and they also own a home in North Carolina.
The Elders are summertime residents of Campbell County, and during the winter they operate a business in western North Carolina that consists of H&R Block tax-preparation offices in several towns.
___
The Hat Creek area traces its origins to 1737, when pioneer settler John Irvine “took up” about 400 acres surrounding Entry Creek and Little Falling River by clearing and working the land — a practice approved by the British crown.
His son, Abraham Irvine, built the first grist mill on the river in 1761. Floods wiped out the mill on the river, but it was replaced by one on the smaller Entry Creek, where the current mill, circa 1900, stands.
According to historic information provided by Elder and other sources, Abraham Irvine died while serving as a soldier in the Revolutionary War.
The land and mill passed through several owners, including Joshua Morris, Paulett Clark and the Rev. James Hurt. In 1870, the mill and nearby land was bought by William T. Harper.
The Harper family were carpenters, and they built many churches and homes in southern Campbell County, Elder said.
The mill structure on Entry Creek was destroyed by a flood in 1901, but most of its gears and operating equipment, including a millstone, were salvaged and reinstalled in the building that now stands just down the hill from the Elders’ home.
Waverly P. Harper, a third-generation descendant, was still operating the mill as a hobby in the 1970s and producing 1,500 pounds of corn meal per month for sale, according to a 1978 newspaper article.
At the time, the mill was powered by a turbine instead of a water wheel, according to Elder.
Another flood broke the rock-wall dam in 1945, and W.P. Harper rebuilt it as a concrete structure, which stands today.
___
Pat Elder said she began looking for a millwright to restore the wheel in 2008.
The search took a while, but a North Carolina millwright who does smaller mills recommended Hassett.
Elder said she invited Hassett to look over her site, and “you could just tell he loved the mill,” she said.
The wheel and its components were built in Hassett’s shop in downtown Lynchburg, and the metal shaft and components were machined at Fabrication Concepts Inc. in Lynchburg.
When Hassett’s workers brought the disassembled wheel, shaft and gears to the site and lifted them into place with a crane, “they just fit like a glove,” Elder said.
___
The News & Advance is published in Lynchburg.
