The photos are in reverse order. Their place in the text after the pictures is indicated. 

AS 15 - A four-generation picture. Alvin Stehr, seated, with his son Wayne, (upper right), grandson Travis (upper left) and great-grandsons Owen (lower left), and Zayden (lower right). Courtesy of Wayne Stehr. 

AS 14 - During its decades of operation, Stehr Brothers Mill issued probably hundreds of different advertising items, and there are some large collections in the area that include even signs from the business.

AS 13 - Inexpensive flour, transported in wooden barrels like this one from the Clinton Mill of Laurens Enos & Co. in Buffalo, New York, was locally sold in general stores throughout the region and gradually put area mills out of business. This barrel was found in the valley. Mahantongo Heritage Center. 

AS 12 - Huge grain elevators such as these in Buffalo, New York, supplied wheat to industrial-scale mills that, even when factoring in transportation, were able to undercut the price of locally-raised and processed flour in the Mahantongo area.

“The Cargill Pool grain elevator in Buffalo, NY, as seen at sunset.”

Photograph by Yatpay, 2011.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cargill_Pool_Grain_Elevator,_Buffalo,_NY_2011.jpg

Public domain. Accessed 2/4/22. 

11. AS 11 - A common method of funneling grain into the grind stones. Gristmill hopper, Skyline Drive, Virginia, 1938. While this photograph is unattributed, it is assumed to be a HABS photo from the Library of Congress. Public Domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gristmill#/media/File:Gristmill_Hopper_1938.gif. Accessed 2/7/2022

AS 10 - Clarence, the crazy cat, rescued at the former Stehr Brothers Mill, circa 1994, being consoled by Bro. Christian.

AS 9 - A "slipper" for feeding corn into the grindstones, at George Washington's Gristmill, Mt. Vernon, Virginia. Photographed September 23, 2007. by Kadin2048. Public domain.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Mt_Vernon_Gristmill_Slipper.jpg

Accessed 2/3/22.

AS 8 - Mahantongo grist mills also custom-milled flour and feed for other mills outside the valley, as these bags, made for businesses in Shamokin and

Sunbury but found in a local mill, indicate.

AS 7 - A diagram of a hammer mill shows how the machine works.

https://www.saintytec.com/working-principle-hammer-mills/

Accessed 2/8/22. 

AS 6 - Exterior of a typical hammer mill, which was the last type of grinder used at the Stehr mill. Steel hammers attached to a rotating cylinder pulverize grain into particles for making feed. Fasoli hammer mill. https://www.industrialdiscount.com/lots/fasoli-hammer-mill-and-flour-conveyor-system-42923/. Accessed 2/4/22

AS 5 - Rolling mills such as this one supplanted grinding stones. Grains were ground between rotating steel cylinders to make both flour and feed. Rolling Mill, Fisher-Fallgatter Mill, Waupaca, Waupaca County, WI. Photograph by Lowe and Jet for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). 1968. Library of Congress. <www.loc.gov/item/wi0005/>. Public domain. Accessed 2-8-2022.

AS 4 - The miller's house, to the left, was possibly built by the first miller, Daniel Herb, before Samuel Knorr bought the mill in the mid-nineteenth century. The grist mill is in the center, where Alvin worked; with the store and warehouse to the right, which was overseen by Chester.

AS 3 - The former Stehr Brothers grist mill today. The first story was brick on top of a stone foundation, with a timber-frame structure above that. This was where Alvin spent most of his time.

AS 2 - The mill's nineteenth-century under-shot water wheel may have looked similar to this water wheel from the Thomas grist mill in Chester County. Thomas Mill, Crum Creek (Willistown Township), Whitehorse vicinity, Chester County. 1933 photograph. Source: HABS (Historic American Buildings Survey), PA,15-WHIHO.V,2-8. Library of Congress. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47678390

AS 1 - The Daniel Herb grist mill and miller's house, as they looked circa 1900 when owned by Samuel Knorr. Courtesy of Joan and Steve Troutman.

Alvin Stehr - The Last Miller of the Mahantongo

by Johannes Zinzendorf

Alvin Stehr, of Hepler, is now in his nineties. He is also the last miller of the Mahantongo Valley. At one time, practically every community in the valley had a grist mill to grind the grain raised by local farmers into flour and other products.

These were water-powered mills, so they were located adjacent to streams and creeks. Typically, a dam was built to back up the water and to provide a steady power source, with water diverted to the mill through a channel called the mill race. Large wooden wheels, often ten feet or more in diameter, were turned by the water; in our area the wheels were usually undershot, meaning the water struck the lower section of the wheel. I do not know of an overshot wheel in the area, where the mill pond was located up a slope behind the mill and the mill race was an elevated wooden trough that aimed the water at the upper part of the wheel. Overshot wheels are more prevalent in New England, typically located at a falls on a river or creek with the mill located below the falls.

In any case, only two mill buildings still exist in the valley of which I am aware; the Old Red Mill of the Gahres family on Creek Road just east of Route 125 [and owned by Marjorie Gahres Boyer], and the Stehr Brothers mill along the Little Mahantongo Creek at the line between Schuylkill and Northumberland creeks.

There is a Gahres connection between the two mills because Joseph Irvin Stehr, who later bought the Knorr mill, married into the Gahres family with his wife, Sallie, and his father-in-law taught him the milling craft of turning grain into flour and feed before he bought his own mill.

The go-to source for local grist mills is the landmark reference book The Penns' Manor of Spread Eagle and the Grist Mills of the Upper Mahantongo Valley by Steve E. Troutman (Third Edition published 2016 by Sunbury Press, Inc.).

According to Troutman, the mill at that site was originally built in 1808 by Daniel Herb.

Photograph AS 1A

The original mill stones were probably locally made from a very hard stone that Troutman [who studied geology in college and has also written Geology of the Mahanoy, Mahantongo, and Lykens Valleys: Something about the Earth We Walk On, Sunbury Press, 2014] says is called “conglomerate sandstone.” The late Felix Masser told me in the 1990s that there were outcroppings of this stone on the top of Line Mountain which are still visible today where the Helfenstein Road crosses the mountain.

This conglomerate sandstone is hard enough for the faces of the stone to be chiseled with the designs necessary to pulverize grain into flour and not be easily worn away. Felix said solid stones were typically locally made, while sectional grindstones – formed of small, individual pieces and held together by iron bands – were not only from other parts of the country, such as New England, but were even brought from France.

At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, the mill was acquired by Samuel Knorr.

Photograph AS 1B

Troutman interviewed Alvin Stehr in 2014 for the grist mill book, and Alvin said it was his father, Joseph, who bought the mill from the Knorr's in 1912.

“At that time the wooden wheel still powered the mill,” said Alvin.

A mill dam was constructed across the Little Mahantongo to form a pond from which water was diverted to the undershot water wheel that operated the dam.

Photograph AS 2

Wooden water wheels were notorious for rotting due to being constantly wet, so Joseph replaced it with an iron wheel, which could have been sand-cast at the nearby Haas iron foundry as the Haas brothers were known for making their own wooden forms.

In that interview, Alvin described the mill as having “a stone foundation on which the first floor brick walls were built. The second floor is constructed of timber framing with massive beams supporting the millstones and the necessary gearing to turn them.”

Three sons of Joseph – Chester, Joe [Joseph Junior, presumably] and Alvin – later purchased the operation from their father and called it Stehr Brothers Mill, with its moniker of “In the heart of the Mahantongo Valley.”

At some point, Joseph had replaced the mill stones with their elaborate wooden gearing with a more modern rolling mill, that produced flour and feed more efficiently. Alvin told Troutman that after he and his brothers acquired the mill, they, in turn, replaced the roller mill in 1950 with a yet more modern hammer mill, which was powered by a gas engine. By this time, the mill was primarily producing animal feed, not flour, though some corn was still ground with a remaining, specialized set of grindstones for cornmeal. There was also a rotary corn meal roaster still in the mill, though no longer used, until the mill closed in 1992.

That was my introduction to the nut-flavored joy of roasted yellow corn meal, something unknown to his southern past, with its unroasted, white corn meal used for grits and cornbread.

Typically I found Alvin in the mill, with his brother Chester across the parking lot in the store. I recall looking enviously at the stacks of bagged animal feed. We rarely had money for commercial feed for our animals and birds, and our elusive goal was to raise our own feed anyway, which never worked out either.

Photograph AS 3

Photograph AS 4

Both men always seemed glad to see me on the times when I would drop by and we would talk the usual country talk about weather and the crops. I think they were more humored by me than anything else.

With the mill's closing and Chester's passing, I realized Alvin was the last miller of the Mahantongo, and a living resource worth interviewing and preserving for the Hermitage's oral history project.

I met Alvin at his home near Hepler on what was fortunately a warm day in February, 2021. Due to the pandemic, Alvin stayed inside while I stayed on the back porch and interviewed him through the glass door.

Alvin said after his father purchased the mill, he initially made both flour and feed.

“There was a rolling mill where they ground up the wheat and made flour. They did that for a while and then they didn't use it any more” and it was eventually replaced with the hammer mill and became strictly a feed grinding and mixing operation.

Photograph AS 5

Photograph AS 6

Photograph AS 7

Alvin was the youngest son, and by the time he joined the business his two older brothers, Joe Junior and Chester, were already working with their father.

“I worked for them” at first, Alvin recalled. “I was going to buy a house, and they said, 'Well, why don't you join us?' So I joined the Stehr brothers. I joined them, I believe it was back in the fifties sometime, something like that.”

After that, the work was shared.

“We all worked together. We made feed and sold a lot of feed to cage houses. There were about three of them that we sold feed to.”

In the years following World War II, many barns and other structures were turned into basically huge chicken houses with the addition of rows of windows, often gathered from old houses. The upper areas of barns were subdivided in separate rooms and sometimes one can still see in them the long rows of wooden tables made for the birds to roost on. The resulting chicken manure from raising hundreds of birds was used as fertilizer.

It was a lot of work for the three brothers.

“We helped each other. We mixed; we made our own feed; we had a hammer mill [for grinding and mixing feed] – the boys put that in – and we made a lot of feed for those chickens.”

They also made custom feed.

“People brought their grain there and we ground it up and made feed for them.”

The feed was put in custom-printed paper bags labeled Stehr Brothers. Every mill had its own personalized bags to identify its products, though some mills also did custom grinding for other mills and feed supply stores and then bagged that feed according to whatever business was buying it. The now-destroyed mill at Klingerstown did this, for example, and unused bags remained in the mill long after it closed from a variety of area mills for which it did custom grinding.

Photograph AS 8

Animal feed required the additional of molasses to bind the grain together.

“We used a lot of molasses,” Alvin said. “We got it by trailer loads from down south, there was an outfit that sold molasses.”

Alvin said there was a significant difference between table molasses and feed molasses.

“You don't want the molasses we gave to the feed mills. It's not like we eat.”

Alvin's son Wayne was raised in the family business and delivered feed throughout the area.

“It was just local sales,” Alvin recalled. “We didn't go maybe 25 miles from our place.”

Wayne worked at the mill until it closed. John Wetzel was another long time employee. He had a number of Stehr Brothers advertising items from his time there, many of which were sold at his own sale in 2021. One large sign brought over $2,000.

The grinding of corn meal was still done with a specialized set of stones, but the shelled corn was “roasted first, and then we ground it. We had stones in; we ground with stones. We roasted a lot of corn and ground the corn and made corn meal. We sold a lot of corn meal.”

Photograph AS 9

Much of the corn meal was sold to area butchers who used it for making scrapple in the fall and winter.

Eventually the older brother, Joe, got out of the business.

“Chester and I bought Joe out and Joe was no longer in the feed mill, and we operated the feed mill maybe five to 10 years after he was out.”

A constant problem around mills are the prevalence of mice and rats, attracted to the grain and flour.

“When my dad bought the mill, the rats were so bad that he had to put poisoned feed out to kill 'em. I don't know what the Knorrs did them.”

“In the feed mill we also used cats for the mice and the rats,” recalled Alvin. Which is how we ended up with Clarence. After the mill closed, farmers still used (as they do today) the weigh scale to measure empty and full loads of grain. One day I stopped to weigh a load of corn and left the pickup door open. When I returned, an old, golden cat was sitting inside. Emaciated from lack of food, living on his own, and so elderly he obviously was unable to hunt, it was also clear he needed help. He looked at me and his gaze said, “Get me out of here.”

Photograph AS 10

So I took him back to the Hermitage, named him Clarence, which is how the last mill cat of the Mahantongo ended up with us. He was set in his ways, a true loner, and never got along with the barn cats. He just wanted to be left alone. He only had a few teeth so his food had to be soft because all he could do was gum it and choke it down. Still, he brought us a lot of joy and we made sure his last years were as comfortable as possible.

At one time buckwheat was commonly raised, in fact, outside Rough and Ready, in the Mahantongo Creek at the former farm of Marie Heim, is a small island called “the buchwesse eiland,” or buckwheat island, where Marie told me buckwheat was grown. Buckwheat has a hard, black, external shell that has to be removed before grinding the interior kernel. Traditionally, the mill stones had to be raised slightly to crack the shell first without crushing the kernel, then the casings had to be removed by sifting them out before grinding the kernels.

If used whole, the kernels could be cooked as groats for a hot cereal. When ground into flour, the buckwheat was commonly used for “buchwesse floppers,” or buckwheat pancakes. It was also used – and still is by some people – as another ingredient in scrapple.

But Alvin doesn't recall ever grinding buckwheat. He does recall, in his early years, making wheat flour.

Photograph AS 11

“We put the wheat in the [rolling] mill and ground it up and separated it, the fines [the white flour] came out one place as the mids [middlings] came out another place.” The middlings were used to make feed.

“It was a very slow process to make flour,” Alvin explained.

Which made it expensive and the mill could not compete in price with mass-produced wheat flour coming by the train load from the Midwest.

Photograph AS 12

Photograph AS 13

“We did a little of it,” said Alvin, “but after I got in, it was gone. We sold [the rolling mill] for junk.”

Alvin was born in 1929, while Chester was eight years older and born around 1921, and Joe was three years old than Chester, so their father, Joseph, had already been operating the mill for a number of years before his sons were able to join him in the business. He likely had at least one hired hand [“knecht,” in Dutch] to help before his sons took over, and they continued hiring help, including Alvin's son Wayne, who typically drove truck, made deliveries, and picked up supplies, until the mill closed.

The late Albert Stehr of Keylers also worked there, in association with Bryant Klinger of Rough and Ready, and the men operated a portable feed mill driven to individual farms where grain supplied by farmers was ground and mixed with animal-grade molasses for custom production. Later, when the Stehr brothers decided to get out of the custom grinding of feed, Jim Hepler of Pitman recalled that Albert bought the truck and continued the custom operation. The truck was a familiar sight as Albert drove around the area.

Photograph AS 14

The mill complex was sold at public sale in 1992 and was purchased by the late Bruce Maurer who kept the grist mill building for personal use, and used the former store and warehouse for a manufacturing business. It is currently owned by his widow, Diane.

With Alvin Stehr as the last miller of the Mahantongo, yet another centuries-old tradition of valley self-sufficiency comes to an end. We make note of it and, in some ways at least, mourn its passing as this isolated location becomes increasingly connected to the world outside its mountain walls. Correspondingly, its people have become less specifically Dutch and more standardized American in persistent social evolution that itself has been ongoing for much of the past two-hundred years of technological change. As the valley becomes more and more integrated into the world around it, there is simply less need for local grist millers, potters, weavers, blacksmiths, iron foundry workers, and all the other trades that flourished here for so long, and that provided jobs for many. Still, the world moves on, and the Dutch are nothing if not adaptable and resilient. Actually, I don't think they are in any danger of losing their “Dutchiness;” it's just may not be as obvious as it once was.

Photograph AS 15

Illustrations

1. AS 1 - The Daniel Herb grist mill and miller's house, as they looked circa 1900 when owned by Samuel Knorr. Courtesy of Steve and Joan Troutman.

2. AS 2 - The mill's nineteenth-century under-shot water wheel may have looked similar to this water wheel from the Thomas grist mill in Chester County. Thomas Mill, Crum Creek (Willistown Township), Whitehorse vicinity, Chester County. 1933 photograph. Source: HABS (Historic American Buildings Survey), PA,15-WHIHO.V,2-8. Library of Congress. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47678390

3. AS 3 - The former Stehr Brothers grist mill today. The first story was brick on top of a stone foundation, with a timber-frame structure above that. This was where Alvin spent most of his time.

4. AS 4 - The miller's house, to the left, was possibly built by the first miller, Daniel Herb, before Samuel Knorr bought the mill in the mid-nineteenth century. The grist mill is in the center, where Alvin worked; with the store and warehouse to the right, which was overseen by Chester.

5. AS 5 - Rolling mills such as this one supplanted grinding stones. Grains were ground between rotating steel cylinders to make both flour and feed. Rolling Mill, Fisher-Fallgatter Mill, Waupaca, Waupaca County, WI. Photograph by Lowe and Jet for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). 1968. Library of Congress. <www.loc.gov/item/wi0005/>. Public domain. Accessed 2-8-2022.

6. AS 6 - Exterior of a typical hammer mill, which was the last type of grinder used at the Stehr mill. Steel hammers attached to a rotating cylinder pulverize grain into particles for making feed. Fasoli hammer mill. https://www.industrialdiscount.com/lots/fasoli-hammer-mill-and-flour-conveyor-system-42923/. Accessed 2/4/22

7. AS 7 - A diagram of a hammer mill shows how the machine works.

https://www.saintytec.com/working-principle-hammer-mills/

Accessed 2/8/22.

8. AS 8 - Mahantongo grist mills also custom-milled flour and feed for other mills outside the valley, as these bags, made for businesses in Shamokin and

Sunbury but found in a local mill, indicate.

9. AS 9 - A "slipper" for feeding corn into the grindstones, at George Washington's Gristmill, Mt. Vernon, Virginia. Photographed September 23, 2007. by Kadin2048. Public domain.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Mt_Vernon_Gristmill_Slipper.jpg

Accessed 2/3/22.

10. AS 10 - Clarence, the crazy cat, rescued at the former Stehr Brothers Mill, circa 1994, being consoled by Bro. Christian.

11. AS 11 - A common method of funneling grain into the grind stones. Gristmill hopper, Skyline Drive, Virginia, 1938. While this photograph is unattributed, it is assumed to be a HABS photo from the Library of Congress. Public Domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gristmill#/media/File:Gristmill_Hopper_1938.gif. Accessed 2/7/2022

12. AS 12 - Huge grain elevators such as these in Buffalo, New York, supplied wheat to industrial-scale mills that, even when factoring in transportation, were able to undercut the price of locally-raised and processed flour in the Mahantongo area.

“The Cargill Pool grain elevator in Buffalo, NY, as seen at sunset.”

Photograph by Yatpay, 2011.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cargill_Pool_Grain_Elevator,_Buffalo,_NY_2011.jpg

Public domain. Accessed 2/4/22.

13. AS 13 - Inexpensive flour, transported in wooden barrels like this one from the Clinton Mill of Laurens Enos & Co. in Buffalo, New York, was locally sold in general stores throughout the region and gradually put area mills out of business. This barrel was found in the valley. Mahantongo Heritage Center.

14. AS 14 - During its decades of operation, Stehr Brothers Mill issued probably hundreds of different advertising items, and there are some large collections in the area that include even signs from the business.

15. AS 15 - A four-generation picture. Alvin Stehr, seated, with his son Wayne, (upper right), grandson Travis (upper left) and great-grandsons Owen (lower left), and Zayden (lower right). Courtesy of Wayne Stehr.