Chewing the fat at the mill

Spend an hour or two shelling corn and chewing the fat with Larry Mustain at his Reed’s Mill, and the conversation eventually comes around to instances of sex in the mill.

“We heard a bunch of splashing by that little bridge (over the mill raceway),” Larry says. “I go over to where I could see what was making the noise, and it was two turtles. I think they were having sex, they were all locked up, as they say. They floated down (the raceway) and I kept thinking, ‘Where are they going?’ They went right over the spillway locked up.”

Mating—or the results of it—is as frequent a topic at this mill as are the weather, politics, and Bloody Butcher corn meal recipes because Larry is the resident genealogist and historian of this bucolic farming valley in northern Monroe County. Larry’s paternal great, great grandfather Thomas Mustain settled in the area circa 1840; the Reeds, his maternal side of the family, have been there for three generations. Fall Reed, his grandfather, was associated with several Second Creek mills; Clara Reed, Fall’s wife, ran the Second Creek Post Office from the 1920s to 1947. Larry was born in the circa 1900 mill house down the road; his cousin owns the 1785 mill house above the mill.

As Larry says, “You could make a career of Second Creek (history),” and Larry has done that. Thus, while old-timers from the region still purchase their open-pollinated corn meals at Reed’s, first-timers typically discover the place in their quest for ancestral information, the whereabouts of an old family farm or directions to the Highland Park Church Cemetery.

Those seeking the “tourist attraction” promised on the highway sign along Route 219 discover a classic water-powered grist mill and a broom factory, both idled because of circumstances beyond Larry’s control. Lacking a water wheel and standing some distance from the creek that powers it, the white frame building bears little resemblance to the mill at Babcock State Park or Cook’s Mill, a distant cousin in the same county (see Goldenseal “Cook’s Old Mill, You Can’t Help But Stop”). “Most of our old mills around here are just for show,” Larry says. “They are tourist attractions, and this is, too, in a way.”

Larry Mustain entering his Reeds Mill. — Reeds Mill owner Larry Mustain does business by appointment and chance; if his Ford Explorer is in the parking lot, he’s at the mill and ready to sell a bag of cornmeal and share free stories with whoever will stop.

Only Reed’s and the long-closed Roger’s Mill, which is in considerably worse condition, remain of the nearly two-dozen mills that once took their power from Second Creek. Fed by the springs of Peter’s Mountain to the southeast, the stream falls 600 feet as it travels from its headwaters to Reed’s Mill on Second Creek Road. Larry says settlers harnessed this free source of energy that rambles through northern Monroe and southern Greenbrier counties.

“Second Creek has never gone dry,” Larry says, drawing upon the anecdotes of family members who worked mills along the creek. “The driest time in running the mill was 1932; they went from May to October with very little rain, but the creek never went dry. But it got to the point where (the miller) could only grind for one hour, then have to wait for the head to fill back up.”

This reliable flow hosted gristmills, sawmills, two woolen mills and a powder mill. The latter manufactured gunpowder from charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter, mined in a cave on the former Dickson farm. The powder mill was the first to go, literally.

“(The owner) was in the house at dark and he needed his glasses,” Larry says. “He realized he’d left them in the powder mill, so he sent his slave and her child out to get them. Not thinking that she was in a powder mill, she lit a candle. The mill blew up and killed both (the slave and her child). The next time it blew up, the owner went in one night to do something in it and it blew up, killing the owner.”

According to the pamphlet Larry hands each first-time visitor, Reed’s Mill was built in 1791 by Archibald McDowell, who owned thousands of acres of land in this area. Larry’s family, long associated with the farming valley, took ownership of the mill in 1914. Larry’s familial tie is through his late mother, “Birdie” Marie Reed, whose brother Aubrey Francis Reed became owner in 1925.

Aubrey Reed, whose epitaph honors him as “A Second Creek Miller in the Gap Mills Tradition,” was born Oct. 12, 1904, and died Sept. 29, 1989. Larry speaks highly of the man who owned both the mill and over 300 acres of farmland on which he grew many of the grains processed at the mill.

Reed’s Mill was built September 1791 by Archibald McDowell. The building’s appearance had changed little by May 1907, when this photograph was made by an uncredited photographer. At the time, it was known as Curry’s Mill. A.F. Reed, purchased the mill April 15, 1926. In the late 1940s, the front of the mill was expanded.

“My uncle was such a character. He had a third-grade education, and I’m totally prejudiced when I say this, but he was the smartest man I ever knew. He never went to church, but he also was the most religious man I’ve ever known,” Larry says.

Larry, born Oct. 25, 1936, came under the care of his Uncle Aubrey when Larry’s father, Emory Parker Mustain, became ill in 1942. Emory had gone to Charleston during the war and contracted a life-threatening illness resulting from exposure to toxins at the chemical plant where he worked. “It took four years to get straightened out from that,” Larry says.

While under Aubrey’s care, Larry worked as a farm and mill hand for his uncle.

“I’d been raised here, and I’d helped him ever since I was a kid,” Larry says. “I shelled corn and stuff from the time I was in third or fourth grade.”

Larry left the valley at 16 and moved to Newport News, Va. He met his late wife Frances there, also a staunch Democrat, reared four children and worked as a teacher and school principal from Virginia to the Midwest to California. In 1975, he returned to Second Creek to help his uncle with the mill and farm.

“As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder, so I had to come back,” Larry says. “I just wanted the mill to stay in the family.”

The times had changed, however, and with those changes in the nation and local economy came impossible challenges for a small, water-powered mill like Reed’s. Indeed, the mill’s waterwheel is long gone, replaced with twin turbines circa 1880. They operate in 10 feet of water below the milling floor; each turbine is capable of 10 horsepower. The turbines power the millstones and drive the mill’s legacy machinery, such as the grain elevator, roller mill, feed mixer and bagger.

“We could grind about 100 pounds an hour,” Larry says. “It all depends on what you’re grinding. Up until two years ago, this whole mill was run off 20 horsepower of water.”

Aubrey’s operation focused on dairy feed when Larry came back in 1975, but Larry saw the mill’s future in offering consumers stone-ground flour and cornmeal ground from the open-pollinated grains grown on the family farm.

Larry worked alongside Aubrey, learning the craft of milling and preparing himself for the responsibility of being the third Reed family member to own and operate the mill. He says people in the valley suspected he’d moved back just to get access to the land and his uncle’s money.

Larry Mustain talks to guests from his office at Reed’s Mill in Second Creek. Larry, is his mid-80s, is finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the challenges associated with the mill, which no longer operates by water power. The mill’s most valuable asset these days is Larry, whose knowledge of the history and families of Second Creek and Monroe County draws many visitors to the mill.

“But it was exactly the opposite of that,” Larry says. “We never talked about specifics when I moved back. … Once, when were bailing hay, he said to me, ‘I’m going to give you this farm.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want you to do that. I said fix it so I can buy it because he lived there with his sister (and family) at the mill house, and I told him that he needed to worry about (taking care of her), also.’”

Whatever he inherited, Larry got it through hard labor, such as shoveling knee-deep mud from the turbine box into buckets and hauling them away. “My uncle told me (as Larry shoveled), “That is the glory of waterpower,” Larry says.

For a man nearing the ninth-decade, however, the glory has become curse and perhaps the end of the mill. Larry says the reason the mill has not ground with water power since 2018 is because mud has filled the holding pond and raceway.. A dam diverts water from Second Creek into the holding pond above the mill, but without periodic flooding that otherwise would have flushed mud from the pond, it has become a fertile, stagnant basin for plant life.

“We’re grinding with a portable upright grinder. My uncle would never use it because it heats the grain, and he said it changed the taste of the cornbread a little bit,” Larry says. “All he would use were the two big stones run by waterpower. But I haven’t used them for three years now.”

His mainstay product is Bloody Butcher cornmeal, an open-pollinated variety with a history reaching back to the Native American occupants of this land. His grandfather and uncle once grew the variety on the bottom land; these days Larry relies upon another farmer for this corn, the ears of which can be red, speckled, purple, orange or white. He claims that these native grains are hardier, higher in anti-oxidants and have more bran than the hybrids that large-scale food producers use for their meals. He points out that these are non-GMO grains.

He also offers buckwheat, once grown on the Reed farm but now sourced from outside supplier because the wild turkeys kept decimating his plantings.

“It’s gotten to where the only thing we can raise here is hay,” Larry says. “In the past two years, we had two seven-acre patches of corn, and the bears ate it all.”

Larry grinds and bags small batches of meal and flour, then stores them in several refrigerators so the product is always available for his regular customers. He does about $2,000 in flour and cornmeal sales annually, hardly enough to justify keeping the operation going or offer it as a profitable legacy for his four children, 10 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren. Family assist him as their time allows, but Larry knows the value of this place is in the land, not its past or the buckwheat flour that “mostly older people want because everybody ate buckwheat cakes from the winter to early spring,” as Larry says.

The mill is open by request and chance. Since losing his wife several years ago, it has become a mainstay in his social life, as well as therapy and something a man rarely gets in his graying days: An opportunity to connect to and perpetuate a family legacy, even if he’s the last man standing.

“I keep thinking I should quit,” Larry tells me. “My saying is: “19 down and one to go, meaning there were (at least) 20 mills on Second Creek and 19 of them are gone. And now, maybe it’s my turn.”

Reed’s Mill is located on Second Creek Road, 1.25 miles east of Route 219 just south of the Monroe-Greenbrier counties line. Call ahead to schedule a visit: 304-772-5665.