Family stories say the mill was built sometime before 1860 along the waters of Spruce Run in Goodwin’s Ferry, Giles County, Virginia. Writing this in 2018, which would be at the very least 158 years later, I wonder if we’ll ever find the true history of the mill. Following is an article copyrighted in 2000 and printed in the New River Valley CURRENT, published by The Roanoke Times.
The story is written by Tom Angleberger.

SPRUCE RUN GRIST MILL                                          Jim Thornhill photography

DURING THE FLOOD OF 1985, A BIG LOG HURLED DOWN SPRUCE CREEK,
HELLBENT ON REACHING THE NEW RIVER.
Instead, plunging into a narrow gully, it hammered into the huge, three-story waterwheel of the Spruce Run Mill.

The sound of mangling metal probably was drowned out by the roaring water, but the damage would remain long after the flood waters had gone. The mighty wheel that had powered the mill for about a century of grinding wheat and corn was wreaked. It hasn’t turned since.

The mill had closed many years before the flood, but the destruction of the wheel dealt the final blow to any hopes of restarting it.

---

“There’s a log back there, I think that was the one that did it,” Tim Howard said, pointing to a weathered monstrosity beach on the creek bank. Howard and his dog, Romeo, live in the mill, which his family is trying to sell for $65,000. The mill once served the Giles County communities of Spruce Run and Goodwin’s Ferry, just a few miles down the New River from McCoy.

Howard, along with his real estate agent L. T Simmons, picked his way down a steep, snow-covered bank to the now-timid creek. Romeo bounded around the slippery rocks without care.

From the road the waterwheel looks large and majestic and ready to turn again. From down at the creek it looms even larger, but the damage is clearly visible – the once-perfect circle now ends in a metallic tangle.

Howard said he once had hopes of getting the mill going again. But the wrecked waterwheel, along with the mill’s general state of disrepair, convinced him he couldn’t afford it.

---

When Howard opened the front door, Romeo bounded into the cold, gloomy grinding room that occupied the entire first floor.

Here countless bushels of grain were ground into countless bags of flour. Millworkers penciled calculations on the side of the stairs. Grain elevators dipped their cups into hoppers. The top millstone turned tirelessly over its motionless companion.

The bottom millstone remains embedded in the floor, while the top stone lies under the staircase. These millstones became obsolete even before the mill did. Their replacement, the American Super Midget Flour Grinder, sits on the other side of the room – a big clanky looking skeleton.

The room is overgrown with the remains of the millworks – gears, axles and wheels sprout from the floor and hang vine-like from the ceiling.

There were few signs of habitation – a worn sofa, a dart board, a picture of Bruce Lee. Most of Howard’s stuff is upstairs, in the cozy, heated apartment with an unbelievable view and the continual soundtrack of the stream splashing past.

The second floor also has two big flour shakers – big brutes of machines bristling with chutes and sieves – and stairs to the third floor. Though the footing is treacherous, the third floor has the best view of all.

Looking out over the wheel, the window frames Spruce Run’s rocky trip down the gully. It switches back and forth, cavorting around rocks during its rapid descent. Finally, the creek disappears behind the wheel which it once powered and later destroyed.

Instead, he fixed up a three-room apartment on the second floor and spent his time poking around, running into the occasional occupant. Shakes, bees, bats, you name it, they’ve introduced themselves.

Mechanically curious, Howard has sorted through the piles of machinery, to figure out how the mill worked.

“It’s like a giant transmission that you can walk through,” he said explaining that everything was connected to the water wheel through some combination of gears, axles, and belts. The waters of Spruce Run, pouring endlessly over the wheel the wheel, powered every aspect of flour and meal making – grinding grain between the millstones, carrying it up tiny grain elevators, sifting it in shaking sieve machines.

---

Old mills are often romanticized, but they weren’t built to be charming or picturesque. They were workhorses – rough and unforgiving.

Scott family history has it that John Scott, son of the mill’s founder, Henry Scott, was killed in the mill, crushed to death by a millstone. Barbara Scott Jacobs, John Scott’s great-great-granddaughter, said his widowed wife was pregnant with twins at the time of the accident in September 1864.

Family history gets a little cloudy after that. But Jacob’s research suggests that John Scott’s son, William H. Scott, grew up to run the mill and the family kept it until around 1910, when it was sold to Grover Cook.

Robert Kessinger, 94, remembers going to the mill as a child when the Scott family still owned it and later when Cook was running it.

Recently, Kesssinger and his wife got together with another longtime Spruce Run resident, Vena McElrath, 93, to talk about life in the early 1900s. They told tales of cold winters, deep snows, butter churns, hogs, stink bombs and a grist mill that was running strong.

“He’d take a toll out of it,” he said, explaining that instead of charging a fee for grinding wheat or corn, Cook simply kept about 10th of the flour and cornmeal.

Both Kesssinger and McElrath remember that the mill served as more than just a place for grinding – it was something of a community center.

McElrath, who had gone to the mill in the 1920s with her father, cast her first vote there in the 1920s.

According to Kessinger, it was also a hotspot on Saturday nights, when folks would gather for a good time. “Some of ‘en had a bottle,” he said.
“I imagine it was bootleg,” chipped in his wife, Mary Helen.

It may well have been. Edison Dowdy, whose father was a good friend of Grover Cook’s, remembers going with Cook to buy bootleg whiskey.

Cook was a good man, but a heavy drinker, Dowdy said. Sometimes he would hole himself up in the mill for long stretches, living off canned sardines from the nearby country store.

Dowdy said Cook was a large man, about 6-foot-2, who wore bib overalls and a big hat stained white by flour.

He remembers Cook explaining why he never married:

“Son, I’m gonna tell. I decided I was going to get married, but…I had to have an ideal woman. He found her, he told Dowdy, but “she was looking for an ideal man.”

Cook closed the mill sometime around World War II, Dowdy recalled, and went to work at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. People weren’t raising wheat anymore and business had gone bad.

The mill never ran again and passed through various hands until the Howards bought it several years ago.