FLOUR MILLS

By Josh Kelly

When early settlers found out they could harvest the bunchgrass that covered the hills, it wasn't long before grain was the primary crop of the Palouse Region.  That was when they realized the need for a nearby flour mill.  The flour mill ground the grain into flour and if they had one in their town, they wouldn't have to go further away to find a town to take their grain.  A flour mill can be either water, steam, electricity, or diesel fuel powered.  The powering system turns buhrs that grind the grain into flour.  Buhrs are large stone wheels that were shipped from as far as France. 

The mill was a very important part of the town and a large part of the income was from selling flour made in the mill.  When the harvest was poor, the whole town would be in trouble, which made farming and working in the mill risky of going bankrupt.  Most mills started becoming popular in every town right at the turn of the century.  They were most often built by one man then sold three or four times before they were closed.  That shows how hard life was if harvest was bad.   The mill owner could lose everything he had.

Most mills when they were first built were next to a river or stream and the water was used to turn a wheel that turned the buhrs.  Then as time went on, the town's people would move the mills closer to railroads and either power them with electricity or diesel fuel.  The mills like the Almota mill had an advantage over some others because the Almota mill was built next to the Snake River.  Large ships could take flour from it or bring grain to it from places like Texas or California.  First built in 1880, the Almota Flour Mill was hit by a cloud burst in 1894 doing irreparable damage.  That was the end of the Almota Mill.

To gauge how productive mills were, they were measured by how many barrels of flour could be made in one day.  Most of the mills in Whitman County produced seventy-five barrels of flour a day.  The Palouse City Mill produced one hundred twenty-five barrels a day.  The only other mill that made that many barrels in one day was the Colfax Mill.  It could regularly produce twenty-five barrels of flour and forty tons of feed per day.  It also produced the best corn meal and rye flour.  That mill opened in 1873, was rebuilt in 1891, and continued operations until 1920 when it burned.  The Colfax Mill was rebuilt and lasted until 1957 when it burned again, this time for good.

Colton's first mill ran from 1882 until 1937, under several different owners and under three different types of power: the first was steam, second was electricity, and finally they used diesel fuel.  The first flour mill in the town of Palouse was built in 1874, one of the first buildings built in the town.  It was powered by the Palouse River and continued milling wheat until 1924.  Elberton had a mill from 1886 until 1908, but they had water problems.  When they tried to use electrical power they lost more money than they brought in, and had to close down.