New book helps others journey to Missouri’s Ozark mills.
by Jim McCarty | jmccarty@ruralmissouri.coop
Barbara Baird recalls one of her first trips as a columnist writing for the St. James Leader-Journal. Her The Accidental Ozarkian columns often led her to out-of-the-way destinations around Missouri. This one took her to a mill between Vienna and Belle.
“The second column I ever did was on the Pay Down Mill, and that was the first mill I had ever seen,” says the North Dakota transplant. “I also met the woman whose great-grandfather had owned it, and had come over from England and bought it. I was so fascinated by that, and I just loved it. I loved going to mills. People would always comment on how much they really liked mills and liked the stories I wrote about them.”
Recently Barbara turned her love of old mills into a new book featuring 26 Missouri mills you can see and in most cases visit. Her book — titled “Milling Around: Exploring 26 Mills in the Missouri Ozarks” — includes some of the history of the mills and her experiences visiting them. Best of all, the book serves as a travel guide for those wanting to follow in her tracks and put together their own tour of Missouri mills.
“In the beginning of the book you can see on the map which mills are close to each other,” the author says. “You could plan to do a few mills in a day in certain sections.”
She points to Highway 19 south of Highway 60 on the map as an example. Falling Spring Mill, Turner Mill and Greer Mill are all relatively close together and would make for an easy day trip. To make things easier, Barbara’s husband, Jason, plotted each of the mills’ locations on road maps provided by MoDOT. He then pinpointed their GPS coordinates. Plugging the numbers into a travel app will take the reader directly to the millsite.
“The maps and the coordinates were born in my frustration because she always kind of turned the directions over to me,” says Jason, a retired professor from Missouri S&T and a former B-52 bomber navigator. “OK, how are we going to get there? And we started this before there was GPS and all that. We had to rely on maps to start with. For the book, I went into Google Earth and made sure through the photographs that I had the right place on the map. Hopefully we can save people the frustration I had in finding these places.”
The Bairds, members of Se-Ma-No Electric Cooperative, started their own tour of Missouri mills in 2000 without any thought to turning their trips into a book. The couple lived all over the U.S. and in England while Jason was in the Air Force. When he retired, he eventually landed a job as an associate professor of mining engineering at Missouri S&T, which brought them closer to his parents’ farm near Norwood.
“I said, ‘If you want to marry me you have to move here someday,’ ” Jason recalls.
“And then I said, ‘Well, if you want to marry me, you have to agree to travel,’ ” Barbara countered. “We made that pact. And then we moved here.”
After graduating from college and finding few jobs for English teachers available, Barbara turned to freelance writing and convinced a reluctant newspaper editor to give her space for her The Accidental Ozarkian column. He told her she would soon run out of ideas. Instead, the column ran for seven years and was picked up by 10 other publications.
The name for the column is a nod to “The Accidental Tourist” by Anne Taylor. In this book the main character writes travel guides for armchair tourists. By contrast, Barbara’s columns were meant to encourage people to discover what is off the beaten path in her new favorite place, rural Missouri.
The column led her on new adventures, bringing her readers along. She traveled Route 66. She toured small towns with interesting names such as Romance. She led her sister on a “junking” tour of antique shops between Springfield and West Plains. Along the way she met interesting people, ranging from artisans to entrepreneurs.
Her journeys frequently led to old mills where she learned their history and met some of their new millers. When the column ran its course, Barbara started an online blog and posted some of the 350-plus columns there. “I’ve been doing analytics through the years, and I always see that people are reading about the mills. They are always in the top 10,” she says. “So, I thought I would write a book.”
“Milling Around” is the result of 24 years visiting Missouri’s old mills and their new owners. “No two mills are alike,” Barbara says. “They have different histories. They might be haunted or they might have had a community that built up around them.”
She points to Klepzig Mill, a tiny wooden structure located along a shut-ins where clear water flows past tough igneous rock. The miller ground corn here and also used water to power a sawmill and generate electricity for his farm. He saved the best boards from his sawmill to make coffins.
At Bollinger Mill she saw where past millers left their initials on the walls. She learned that some of the machinery at Alley Spring Mill came from the mill at Summersville when that mill upgraded its services. She was told Topaz Mill had a barbershop where you could get your hair cut for a quarter while waiting for your corn to be ground.
Details like this abound in her accounts of the mills, while Jason’s photos help tell the story of what’s there.
Each section ends with information on what else to do while in the area. For example, Klepzig Mill can be reached by hiking a trail that leads from Rocky Falls to the mill. Other mills might be great places to catch fish. Or in the case of Rockbridge Mill, guides will show you how to fly fish for rainbow trout and the excellent restaurant will cook your catch.
Ask the Bairds which mill is their favorite and they both will be hard-pressed to answer. “My favorite is the one I’m with. Like the song says, ‘Love the one you’re with,’ ” Barbara says. “I love them all.”
In her introduction to the book, Barbara explains her love of old mills with this comment: “I’ve seen Joe Bob O’Neal, the miller of Topaz, open the raceway and grind corn into cornmeal. I’ve been onsite at Dillard Mill when the resident miller ‘let ’er rip.’ I can’t begin to describe the energy that pulsed throughout that old building as the dust of the ages swirled through the air like fresh hatches on a trout stream. I will never forget those times.”
“Milling Around” can be ordered through Amazon. For a link or more information visit The Accidental Ozarkian at www.ozarkian.com or search for it on Facebook and Instagram.