The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.
Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
Located on Lot 22, Concession 3 of Eramosa, Birge’s Mill was one of the few flour milling operations in Wellington County not in a town or village.
In its pastoral setting, the property offers greeting-card beauty, evocative of a long-lost past. Geography was responsible for the mill’s location. Luttrell Creek, a branch of the Speed, offered a commercially significant and reliable water power potential at Lot 22.
Birge’s Mill, also known to more recent residents as Wheeler’s Mill, was also one of the last of the old mills to close in this county, doing business until 1993.
Originally, this mill site was on a 200-acre farm plot, which Peter McCallum secured through a crown patent in 1821. He flipped it five months later to Abe Secord, and this family held the property for the next 21 years.
Edward Huxtable, an American who had been in the lumber business in Pennsylvania, bought the 200-acre plot in March 1843. He immediately set to work building a dam across the creek to provide power for a sawmill.
Land clearing in Eramosa reached its peak in the 1840s. Huxtable found a ready supply of logs in the neighbourhood, and good markets for lumber among farmers, and in the booming villages of Fergus and Rockwood, both eight miles distant.
With little interest in farming, Huxtable sold the eastern 100 acres of the property to John Blakeley in 1845. Death claimed Ed Huxtable in 1850. His widow Harriet carried on the business, leasing it out to operators until her son James was ready to take over. With permission of his guardian (he was not yet of legal age), Jim Huxtable sold about 88 acres of the property to Alex and Jim Gow in 1862.
Like his father, Jim Huxtable was drawn to the lumber business. He used the money from the sale of the 88 acres to finance a small lumbering operation at nearby Shiloh.
Around 1864 he sold out and returned home to take over operations there. Jim Huxtable operated his father’s sawmill until March 1870, when he sold out to his cousin, Alonzo Birge. Both were nephews of James Peters, a prominent pioneer in the area who was arrested as a rebel during the 1837 Rebellion. Jim took back a mortgage on the sawmill for $700.
Alonzo expanded the business during the early 1870s, putting in new equipment and ranging farther for good logs. He set up a second company, Birge and Lynett, to buy timber from farmers, cut it and haul it to the mill. Operating mostly during the winter, Birge and Lynett provided seasonal employment to more than a dozen farmers.
With declining supplies of logs, Birge decided to shift the business to flour milling. In the fall of 1880 he started construction on a four-storey stone building. By mill standards of the day, it was a modest structure. Backed with a $2,400 mortgage, he equipped the mill with a double set of stone grinding equipment. This was one of the last flour mills constructed in Wellington, but its style harkens back more than a generation, to the mills of the 1850s.
Birge’s Daisy Brand pastry flour, made from locally-grown winter wheat, quickly found a place at the general stores in the area, with outlets as far as Rockwood. Many farmers brought in wheat to be made into flour for their own use. Birge also sold it directly to customers at the mill.
He developed a solid local market, though in comparison with the flour mill of James Goldie in Guelph, Birge’s production was insignificant. Occasionally he secured a bulk order, and shipped by rail from Rockwood.
Unlike many small-time operations, Birge operated continuously, if not prosperously, through the 1880s.
A blacksmith shop joined the saw mill and flour mill at his little complex. There was also a steam engine to supply power when the creek level dropped, and a second one to power the sawmill. Financially, though, the situation was not bright. He reduced his mortgage by only $400 during the decade.
Alonzo Birge made some major new capital investment in the spring of 1893. The reasons are not entirely clear. It appears that Birge added a chopping mill around this time, but this would not account for all the additional financing, which consisted of a second mortgage of $2,600, and a mortgage on equipment for $1,750 to Goldie and McCullough, the machinery manufacturers of Galt.
There may have been a fire at the mill, but so far I have not found any evidence for one. In any case, with the $2,000 remaining on his original mortgage, Birge’s obligations in the summer of 1893 totalled more than $6,000.
For the next 15 years, Alonzo Birge tried to work his way from under this burden. It took him 10 years to pay off the equipment mortgage. Prices improved somewhat, but volume did not. The log supply dwindled to the point where he decided to shut down the sawmill around 1900. Hard Manitoba wheat, and the efficiencies of big-city mills, ate into the demand for his flour and the margins he could earn milling it.
Alonzo Birge decided to retire in 1908, under pressure from his mortgage holder, William Jenkinson, who threatened foreclosure. He turned the business over to his sons William and Charles. With a package worked out by Guelph lawyer Water Buckingham, Jenkinson agreed to let the boys continue the mill for a cash payment of $200 and a $3,000 mortgage. Alonzo did not get a penny to support his retirement. The Birge boys lacked even the down payment – they had to borrow it from Buckingham.
William and Charles sharpened their pencils and got down to business, concentrating on the most profitable activity, which was chopping and mixing grain for cattle feed. The blacksmith shop lasted until the First World War era. They avoided capital expenditures, and did the bulk of repair and maintenance work themselves. From time to time they fired up the old sawmill. Charles Birge took over his brother’s share in 1929.
Flour milling, about half of which was custom milling for farmers, continued until 1942 on a very modest scale. Even so, dozens of local homemakers refused to bake with anything but Daisy Brand flour.
Charles Birge sold the mill in 1942 to Carl and Cuyler Wheeler. He and his wife moved to a house in Rockwood, but rather than retire, he worked for the rest of the war years at Hortop’s mill, which was short of workers in this period.
The Wheelers operated the business as a feed and chopping mill. Their major expenditure was for seed cleaning equipment and a diesel engine, which became the prime source of power. The location of the mill, in a neighbourhood with no competition for several miles in any direction, made this a convenient resource for farmers.
In 1960, the Wheelers sold the business to Fred Sendall, who continued to operate under the Wheeler name until 1975. William Britton, a Toronto firefighter, was the next owner. He continued the feed operation with the assistance of Gord Allan, a former employee. Charles Milne, the former operator of a feed mill in Rockwood, later rented the building.
Britton had various plans for the mill and dam over the years. The mill building suffered from deferred maintenance, and the dam had suffered the ravages of ice and storms.
At the time of its closure in 1993, Birge’s (or Wheeler’s) Mill had outlived its competitors to become one of the last small feed mills in Wellington County.
By coincidence, this was exactly 150 years after the first industrial activity on the site – Ed Huxtable’s primitive sawmill of 1843.
*This column was originally published in the Advertiser on May 17, 2002.
