Mill+Myths

**These posts relate to comments that have been overheard that are not factual in nature...**
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**22 July 2011 - A Wheel From Where?**
__Yates Mill's waterwheel was not made in the mountains of North Carolina.__Yates Mill's waterwheel was made right here in Raleigh during the early 1990s. Mr. Jefferson Sugg took on the wheel's reconstruction working with Yates Mill Associates (YMA) and local craftsmen. The current 12-foot tall waterwheel was modeled after Yates Mill's old wheel which was left rotting in the mud below the mill (which may have been the wheel that was built after the snowy winter of 1927 destroyed the preceeding wheel - supposedly Yates Mill's miller Mr. John D. Lea, Sr, and his nephew Hugh Champion built the 1927 wheel). By the way, in regards to Yates Mill's waterwheel, nationally-known millwright Derek Ogden once remarked that he thought that it was unusual for a mill to have a waterwheel made from Pine rather than from woods such as White Oak or Cypress. The current wheel was returned to its operational position in about the year 2000 - just in time for the new MILL-enium. It took a while after that before the mill's 30-foot long oak forebay was finished and the wheel could be turned.



**15 July 2011 - Tricky Transport**
__We do not know if wheat flour and/or corn meal was ever shipped down the Cape Fear River, or on other rivers.__ Yates Mill is know to be a "Custom Mill" rather than a "Merchant Mill" - i.e., it likely provided its milling services solely to the local community and probably did not shipped mill products to markets outside of the local region. However, if there were materials being shipped to and from the mill (such as buhr millstones from France), it seems plausible that this may have occurred on the Cape Fear River considering that access to that river is direct from the ocean, rather than through the Outer Banks as would be required to transport materials along the Neuse River (which was only navigable by ship up to Smithfield, NC). Transport on the Cape Fear also seems plausible considering how close the river comes to the Yates Mill area (as can be seen on the historic map shown below), but some across-land transport would still have been necessary. It's hard to say if this travel route would have been easier and/or used more than a route from the Neuse, then across land to the Mill.



**12 July 2011 - Waterwheel Woes:**
__Yates Mill's waterwheel has never been moved downstream from the mill by floodwaters, or by any other cause__. However the wheel has been rotated by swirling high water events multiple times. In June 2006, the floodwaters of Tropical Depression Alberto did almost undermine the waterwheel by removing most of the pieces of the stone pier that holds up the wheel's south-facing bearing block, but the weight of the wheel itself kept enough stones in place to keep the wheel in place.