Cider Mill Stories: A Newly Restored Gem at 19th Century Willowbrook Village
This is an apple cider press story; it begins with me witnessing cider making the old fashioned way as a child. My family had an orchard of Baldwin apples that were sold to a local cider mill regularly, but I never witnessed what went on in the local mill down the road which used modern equipment to press what I knew to be the wormiest apples you ever did see. Watching the eight foot press with wooden screws produce golden cider which ran down a channel chiseled into its granite slab pedestal on one of many visits to Museum Village, near my hometown of Warwick, NY, made quite an impression on me. This first press in my experience was likely of pre-industrial vintage. Some 40 years later I was back at Museum Village as its museum director when I had to go that far afield from my adopted Maine home to secure a paid museum directorship.
Taking this position meant returning to an area I had left after high school and long separations from my family and home (my wife teaches in Bangor). Eventually the distance and separation forced me to return home to Maine and teach until a time when I could find a comparable museum directorship there. On my first day of interviewing at Museum Village, I made a B-line for the cider press I remembered, after a first stop at the equally memorable complete mastodon housed in the nearby natural history building on the campus. This museum has many similarities to Maine’s own 19th Century Willowbrook Village in Newfield, where I now serve as director, in that it has more than 25 structures and a comprehensive collection of 19th century American material culture.
What I discovered was that the press and grinder at Museum Village had lost the shed that once housed it in recent years; the deteriorated remains of which lingered amidst the saplings and vegetation that had reclaimed the site. The paved path to the cider mill had disappeared under decades of leaves. The mill was no longer part of the museum’s self-guided tour like many other buildings in this contrived “village” of yore created in the late 1940s to house one man’s collection ( like the story of many other museum villages, like Sturbridge, Greenfield Village, and Willowbrook, which opened in 1970 exactly 20 years after Old Museum Village at Smith’s Clove).
On one of the museum founder’s many collecting sprees, the hand hewn armature and oak screws of the press were purchased from a barn 10 miles outside Brattleboro, Vermont and the granite slab that had once held another press was found near Northampton, MA. The grinder, which originated from an apple whiskey distillery in New Jersey, was a truly unique piece as it consisted of a crude granite stone cradled on a wooden framework. The granite piece had been drilled out to create a type of mortise and its pestle was another granite piece that fit inside its recess. A metal shaft was fastened into this pestle which could be turned with a long wooden handle 360 degrees to crush apples fed into it. The contents seemingly had to be shoveled out and up into the square pressing frames ( seen in the early postcard photo). No lattice basket was used.
When I saw the press again after many decades it sat there listing to one side and the grinder was both deteriorated and buried under debris from the mill. The wooden press was in remarkable condition for being exposed to the elements for so long. It was all seemingly salvageable and within weeks of becoming director I spent after hours cleaning up the site with the intention of disassembling the press and grinder and storing it for the purpose of restoration and operation in the future. It became a bit of an obsession. I got the local municipality to show up one day with a front end loader and help me disassemble and lower the huge beams onto pallets. The area near the museum had grown as an agri-tourism destination with more apple orchards than I remembered due to the demands of a new generation of families focused on good food choices. This demographic willingly traveled more than an hour from the city to get what they needed on weekends. Resurrecting this cider press might be a “wow factor” for re-invigorating interest in the museum that had far less visitation than in the 1970s when I frequented it. Unfortunately, there were a lot of other things that took priority over this piece given the museum’s ongoing financial struggles; kudos to all those that continue to keep faith in this museum that touched so many lives and continues to do so.
The idea of making cider with such a huge apparatus has stayed with me even though I didn’t have the opportunity to save that particular press of childhood memory and of recent experience. Spin forward to July of 2013 when I am offered the directorship of 19th Century Willowbrook Village in Newfield. The position had been offered to me in 2011, about the time I was making the decision to return to Maine. Given the fact that I was leaving a museum that I loved due to the long separations from my family the distance between York and Penobscot counties didn’t seem much better. I turned the position down only to be offered it again 15 months later after teaching high school for a year. I jumped on it the second time around.
Seeing Willowbrook’s twin screw cider press confirmed that this really was the right decision. The long standing static display of this press was a bit puzzling though as it was in part anchored into the ground, a dry stack fieldstone hole had been constructed below it for the purpose of collecting cider, and there was a long trough construction that the apple crusher was propped up on to collect crushed apples that were presumably shoveled into the square frames contained within the square lattice basket. This was of a later period than the aforementioned press at Museum Village; it includes cast metal screws rather than oak ones albeit the use of both materials for these times of screws overlapped.
Ashley Gerry, who has been on Willowbrook’s staff for more than 20 years, in addition to running his own maple sugaring house and countless other things, and who can do just about anything if given the task, had when we got to talking about the museum’s press shared that he had often dreamed of making the twin metal screws operable. He too doubted the accuracy of the way that the press was set-up. We shared a common dream about making the thing right which resulted in me sitting down and writing several grants that focused on developing a combination of programming and hands-on exhibits emphasizing Southern Maine’s apple industry. Funds were awarded for the purpose of restoring the museum’s twin screw press ( a Waterville Iron Manufacturing Co., “Webber and Haviland” casting; 1843-July 1, 1875 was the only period in which these two names alone were used) and flat-belt pulley driven grinder to develop an annual cider festival event and hands-on history programming centered around them. Making a wooden hand-crank apple sorter operable and child friendly is another future plan. Partial funding for the press and grinder came from the Davis Family Foundation of Yarmouth and Narragansett Number One Foundation of Buxton.
About the time we began the restoration, a fellow showed up at the museum looking for someone who could pour a lead babbit for his 1880s shingle mill. My guy Ashley had poured a babbit in months past for the museum’s 1894 Armitage-Herschell steam engine which runs our horse carousel. The plan for a future babbit pouring was struck and to make a long story short this guy was currently rebuilding a foundation and replacing sills in a local barn that he claimed had a similar apple cider press and grinder in situ that he believed was once powered by a horse treadmill. We were there the next day looking at the cider mill which was very similar to Willowbrook’s. The remarkable thing about all the cider making equipment at the site was that it appeared as though someone had walked away from it a century ago and never returned. Everything was intact.
The press and grinder were configured in a two story space in a barn. Apples had been poured in a hopper at the front barn door below the square lattice basket with a channeled plate composed of multiple boards that fit together with crudely carved story marks by someone who presumed to know Roman numerals but didn’t; our own has identical story marks. In the hopper was an apparatus that looked like a barn cleaner that carried apples above the twin screws where the apple crusher was positioned and subsequently crushed them and dropped them below. A line shaft with flat belt pulleys was attached to the barn cleaner as well as the crusher. A third flywheel ran to the power source outside. Whether there was a horse, steam or gas as a power source we don’t know, but it could have been any one of these. On the second floor of the mill there was a trap door and a block and tackle above it. There were wooden barrels positioned on wood rails around the room; the cider was put into barrels below and then hoisted to this space (See photo documentation at: 19thcenturywillowbrookvillage.blogspot.com).
This was a huge breakthrough for our project as we had an untouched working model to inform the configuration of our press and grinder. We have since then re-wooded the grinder with oak and re-placed the galvanized tin sheathing on its grinding drum with stainless to make the cider more palatable. The new teeth are identical to the original as we used the same puncture method to form the convex, jagged cutting blades of the grinding drum. We will create cribbing to raise the apparatus to a height above the twin screws. All the timbers of the original mortise and tenon framework were replicated with 10 inch wide rough cut hemlock from Stillwater. We will create a new lattice basket and frames for the crushed apples soon.
We created a free standing unit that sits on a new concrete slab with a drainage system that was partially donated by F.R. Carroll Cement of Limerick. This week we re-created the channeled pressing plate out of two layers of 1 ½ inch tongue and groove spruce; the original with its prominent story marks will be displayed. We will create a smaller size lattice basket, as the original was good for more than 50 bushels. We will be making more modest batches of cider. Our vintage Hocking Valley Senior produced 17 gallons of cider this past September 20-21 weekend from nearly 9 bushels of cider apples. We invited the public to bring their own apples and plastic jugs; we anticipate cider making with the large press and grinder by the end of October. The grinder will be powered by a1880s horse treadmill that visitors can climb abroad and power.
We are currently receiving requests for October field trips by area schools, and we are offering the experience of cider making in addition to all the other offerings that are new at Willowbrook this season, including out Titantic and Carpathia Marconi radio rooms with a working telegraph system, our working Victorian kitchen, our new granary scenario that also requires that visitors hop aboard a horse treadmill and power an 1870s portable grist mill. There is other new hands-on programming at Willowbrook that it is worth a visit to see, but what will be most satisfying is seeing golden cider run from our cider press once again as it once did long ago.
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