Mills

One of the key features of the medieval as well as the colonial community was the mill. Without the mill, people would not have eaten (at least not well), timber would not have been sawn (at least not easily and uniformly), paper could not have been made, nor cloth fulled (that is, made weather-resistant). Put simply, the mill was the heart of the community. Often, the mills would be the first common structure built, and but before the church in most cases. As one wag put it, a person can wait to pray; they can't wait to eat. INdeed, the very year after Jamestown was founded, a captain Newport arrived with seventy people (to add to the colony of 130), "chiefly Artificaers; and particularly... to build Mills, and other Machines." The Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts waited longer for some reason (11 years), but as the colonists spread out from Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Qubec, and elsewhere, they built mills as they went.

The technology of powered milling came from Europe in the form of watermills, windmills, and animal- and handmills. Waterwheels are iconic to all and reach back into antiquity, although it was the European Middle Ages that brought them into widespread, developed form. Windmills are evocative of Holland even though they were used from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and they are indeed a quintessential medieval invention. The less common animal mill used a draft animal such as a horse walking in circles to provide the motive power, and the ubiquitous handmill served those too remote from a powered mill or those trying to avoid paying a fee (a 'toll') to have their grain ground at a powered mill.