The Red Mill – Jericho, VT
I didn’t know, the first time I stood on the bank of the Browns River with a camera, that I was standing at the site of at least three different mills. Before the building I was photographing ever existed, Anson Field Sr. ran a cabinet shop and starch mill on this same spot, sometime before 1855. It’s easy to forget how many businesses a single stretch of moving water could support in Vermont before electricity — this bend of the river once powered eight separate mills. Only two are still standing. This is one of them.
The mill I was there to shoot went up in 1856, built by James Hutchinson, who paid for it with money he’d made speculating in cattle during the California Gold Rush — a strange, roundabout way for a Jericho grist mill to get built, but Vermont history is full of money that traveled farther than the people who earned it. Hutchinson turned the site into a proper stone grist mill, and it changed hands a few times before Ferdinand Beach and Lucien Howe bought in around 1867. Howe eventually bought Beach out, and under his ownership the mill ran five runs of millstones with a crew of five or six men, grinding not just local grain but wagonloads of wheat and corn shipped in from the Midwest — twenty thousand bushels of wheat and ten thousand of corn a year, turned into flour, buckwheat, graham, corn, oat, and rye meal sold as far as New England.
The mill I actually recognize — the one on the shirt — didn’t exist yet. That came in 1885, when Howe’s son Frank took over and rebuilt the whole operation almost from scratch. They blasted the riverbed with dynamite to deepen it, cutting a twenty-seven-foot head of water to power four new turbines. They tore out the old millstones and put in roller mills from the Case Manufacturing Company of Columbus, Ohio — at the time, considered the most advanced grain-grinding equipment made in the country. They added the stories and the square tower that give the building its shape today, sided it in stamped red metal, and renamed the whole operation Chittenden Mills, after Frank’s great-great-grandfather, Vermont’s first governor. A local paper at the time called the finished building “an ornament to the village and an honor to its builders.” Grain came in by rail. Flour went out the same way, all over New England, for the next sixty years.
It didn’t last past 1946. The big western mills could grind cheaper and ship faster than a water wheel on the Browns River ever could. The mill changed hands several more times in its last decades — Moses Whitcomb, Charles Reavy, Carman Brush and his son, the E.W. Bailey Company — before finally closing for good. What happened next is the part almost nobody guesses: the building spent years afterward as an auto repair and paint shop, and the upper floors — where flour dust had hung in the air for sixty years — became a rifle range and a basketball court.
By the early 1970s, Jericho had had enough of watching the building drift toward ruin. The town bought it and leased it to the newly formed Jericho Historical Society, which took over ownership outright by 1975. It went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Today it’s a museum and a craft shop, and it’s still, unmistakably, red.
I went there looking for a different take on the Mill. I thought if I did a long exposure I could get some sweeping clouds. I put a dark neutral density filter over the lens and held the shutter open thirty seconds, long enough to pull them into streaks across the sky. The bridge is the obvious place to shoot from, but every car that crossed it shook the whole structure hard enough to ruin the exposure. The traffic was non-stop and the shot was impossible from up there, so I climbed down the bank instead and found a spot low on the rocks at the river’s edge, close enough to the water that the mill rises up over you rather than sitting across from you. It’s not the angle most people see this building from.
This image is now on a Vermont photo shirt https://shop.myhometownvermont.com/products/jericho-vermont-photo-shirt-signature-design
A hundred and seventy years of milling, blasting, roller mills, rifle ranges, and one very patient historical society, all sitting quietly on a bend of the Browns River that most people just drive past.
