It Happened Here -- Welcome to a "Tech Valley" --1830's style!

You well might wonder what would provide the employment of "so many mechanics" in West Berne in 1830-1834, some seventy-five years before automobiles came into existence. and no railroads  within many miles of the Helderberg mountains. But "mechanic" is a term that became increasingly narrow in it definition.  In pre-industial times anyone, who was not a merchant or a farmer, who used tools and worked with his hands to produce a product might be called a mechanic. Thus carpenter/joiners, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, glassmakers and gunsmiths might all be called mechanics. But by the first decades of the 1800's a mechanic was coming to mean, predominately, someone who built or maintained the machines that produced products. In effect, most mechanics were becoming "millwrights." And mills were sprouting up all over the northeast in towns with fast moving streams  that could provide waterpower for powering mills. Hamlets like East Berne, Berne, and West Berne coalesced around streams like the Switzkill and the Foxenkill. 

The Berne falls--In the 1800's multiple millponds and sluiceways were here

As early as 1751 Jacob Weidman built a gristmill at the Berne falls. In 1832 Malachi Whipple rebuilt the gristmill, which was operated until the end of WWII.

Saw mills were built in several locations, first with reciprocating vertical saws then, later in the century with circular saws, that might be "ganged" together to saw multiple planks with a single pass.

In 1858 East Berne saw the construction of a large five story grist mill which by 1886 had four sets of mill stones powered by a 22 foot diameter mill wheel which also powered a mechanical lift used to raise bags of flour to its upper floors.

In colonial times mill construction might be shared by the miller and a local carpenter/millwright who had had some apprenticeship training/experience in mill construction, but as mills became more complicated the trade of millwright/mechanic became a profession all its own.

In 1785  Oliver Evans, a young inventor and wheelwright by trade, developed the first automated flour mill using a variety of devices to move bulk materials--bucket elevators, conveyor belts and archimedean screws.  Despite taking out patents, his ideas were widely copied and finally in 1834 he published them in a book, The Young Millwright and Miller's Guide.  Mill construction and maintenance was becoming a vocation for a specialist.  He also developed a machine for drawing and bending wire and inserting it leather straps' to be used in the wool carding process.

Carding was a process of straightening or combing out wool fibers so they could be twisted into strands to be woven, and fulling was a process of stripping the excess oils from raw wool, to plump it up, to ready it for spinning.  Both of these had been done, by farm families, laboriously, by hand before machines had been created at the end of the 18th century. Malachi Whipple with William Ball and Lyman Dwight also built a Carding and Fulling Mill at the Berne falls.

The largest employer in Berne was Daniel Simmons Axe Factory built in 1825, which was said to have employed 200 workers and turned out 600 axes and other edged implements a day!  Using the abundant Helderberg timber for charcoal and for ash tool handles, it refined pig iron, produced elsewhere, into steel axe heads. Water power, from sluiceways on the Foxenkill no doubt both operated the factory's bellows and powered its trip hammers and other machinery.





Marker of the Week--Revisiting 11/12/13
Last year I posted a set of Markers of the Week which featured some "Remnants of the Horse Powered Society" which included the Unionville Reformed Church with its set of horse and carriage stalls. Recently I came upon another old church, a Quaker meeting house dating back to 1790 (the existing building 1807).  Located in the hamlet of Quaker Street on NYS Rte 7 near its intersection with NYS Rte 20.  It too, has a set of stables, and like the Unionville church, appears to be still going strong.