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Grinnell Mill
advocates look toward site’s future
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| Jim
Hammond and John Finn stand behind the Grinnell Mill. Two uses the
group has envisioned for the mill include a bed and breakfast and
an artist retreat center. |
By Lauren Heaton
From the road, Grinnell Mill these
days looks the same as it’s looked for the past several decades,
a craggy red barn with boarded windows and a singed corner or two from
various nocturnal vandals.
But around the back of the building, a newly filled mill race and a flawless
limestone foundation suggest someone spent a considerable amount of time
there recently. Go down to the basement, where the extracted Leffel’s
turbine and the leveled dirt floor are evidence that someone has put more
than a little money into the project. Go upstairs, where the freshly cleaned
floors and supported interior beams prove that someone who cares about
the mill is doing something to fix it.
The Grinnell Mill’s rehabilitation is far from finished, but a core
group of almost 20 Yellow Springs Historical Society members, township
trustees and mill supporters met Sunday at the Senior Center to begin
discussing the mill’s future. Participants talked about turning
the mill into a bed and breakfast, an artists’ retreat center, a
Glen Helen ranger’s station or a Native American heritage lodge.
Whatever the use, everyone agreed that the mill would need an open historical
display, a resident custodian for maintenance, and a heap of fundraising
activities to cover the cost to make these ideas reality.
Since early January, when the Miami Township Trustees acquired the mill
from Antioch College, the trustees, local resident Jim Hammond and a host
of other dedicated volunteers have worked an average of 10–20 hours
a week to stabilize the community’s historical relic and find out
if the timber frame structure is truly salvageable.
On Friday, timber frame restoration specialist Duncan Burns from Akron
toured the mill and concluded that the post and beam structure could be
repaired at a cost of anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000, township trustee
Chris Mucher said after speaking with him.
“He said there’s nothing fatal, except for maybe the cost,”
Mucher said.
Since the first of the year, most of the work to restore the foundation,
fill in the millrace, clean out countless oversized dumpsters of debris
and rebuild the millstone foundation has been done with donated materials
and a good deal of volunteer labor.
Local resident Todd Van Lehn donated clay and fill, and Hammond’s
brother-in-law Randy Wyatt excavated and filled in the mill race. Hammond,
who owns Hammond Drierite Co., Ltd., in Xenia, also asked company employee
Steve May and friend Frank Pavliga, an architect from Canfield, Ohio,
to bring their expertise to the mill. The trustees and road and bridge
superintendent John Finn have also donated labor to help restore the building.
In addition to the $4,000 the township used to purchase incidentals, Mucher
estimates that the volunteer labor used to this point would be worth at
least $10,000.
But in order to prevent the building from deteriorating further, Hammond
estimates $100,000 is still needed to repair some of the rotten and bug-infested
pieces of the timber frame and to replace all of the mill’s siding
with insulated panels.
With pledges from several of his family members, the Drierite company
and some of his own money, Hammond is committed to seeing the mill through
at least to that point, he said. “It’s worse than we thought
as far as the deterioration of the timbers,” he said. “But
we’re already into it, and we’re going to keep going until
we’re finished.”
But to get the mill to a functional state for any use, Hammond estimates
another $100,000 will be necessary to install a sewer system, plumbing,
utilities, interior walls and doors and anything else needed for the inside
of the building.
That’s where the community group comes in. In order to estimate
a cost, those interested have to decide what purpose the building will
serve. Once the use is established, volunteers will be needed to coordinate
fundraisers and solicit participation from individuals in the community.
The Historical Society, a nonprofit organization, has established a Grinnell
Mill fund for tax-deductible donations should people feel able to start
contributing now. Once the mill’s function is decided, the trustees,
the Historical Society and possibly Antioch University officials anticipate
forming their own foundation to oversee and fund the operation of the
mill, Mucher said. The mill should generate its own maintenance funds
once it is operational, but until then, the money needs to come from the
community, Historical Society president David Neuhardt said.
“I hope we hit a pot of gold, but more likely we’ll have to
do it the old-fashioned way, through small fundraisers and individual
efforts,” Neuhardt said. “People will definitely be hearing
more from us.”
The mill preservationists have a long way to go to complete the building’s
construction. And those planning the mill’s future still have to
agree on the best use of the building and to implement a plan to make
it run.
But according to many who attended Sunday’s meeting, everyone agreed
that the main purposes of preserving the historic building are to communicate
the importance of the mill in the history of the Little Miami River and
to prevent a unique structure from disappearing like so many others that
have already been lost.
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