Section 2, Chapter 4

Tales From the Watermill, Introduction:  Just like Abe Lincoln, I Face Losing it All,  We Meet a Fine Bunch of Folks and the Origin of Stetson Hats.

Daddy and Abraham Lincoln had this in common:  They could both spin a pretty good yarn, and were both born in log cabins. Cook and Appie were married in February of 1910 and moved into an old log house at the watermill that Cook’s father, Latson Douglas Anderson, owned and operated.  On November 27, 1910 – nearly exactly nine months later --  my father, Bardie Harlis Anderson, was born and another baby followed every two years for 18 years. Those folks got down to business.

Cook and Appie later bought the property where Uncle Douglas and Aunt Jesse Lee lived.  That’s where Daddy was mostly raised.  They bought the property across the road from Fairfield Baptist Church (Daddy referred to it as ‘The Old Green Place’) when Daddy was a young teenager.   That’s where we cousins spent many Sunday afternoons and Christmas Eves and where I  began a life-long love affair with the woods.

Oops, I just came to a fork in the story and I was about to take it (as Yogi Berra says).  I guess we had better stick to the straight and narrow and get back on the, uh, Anderson Water…mill, uh, fork, uh, maybe? Oh, what the heck:  The sign says “Other Watermill Stories” and looks so enticing, we just have to explore it. Follow me.

Oh my gosh, What’s that just ahead? Why, I do believe it is our old house in DeKalb and it’s a dark and stormy night in April of 1975: The wind is howling, lightning is flashing, thunder is roaring, Paula and I are huddled,  in fear,  on the floor of the little house we bought that very day and had not yet gotten insured, and about twelve miles to the northwest debris that was, only seconds ago,  Sciples’ Watermill – probably Mississippi’s second-oldest continually operating business (the Natchez newspaper claims to be the oldest) --  are being scattered across the landscape by a tornado.

When I got off active duty with the Navy in May of 1973, I was re-hired by the Mississippi Forestry Commission, and was assigned to the little backwater village of DeKalb, in Kemper County, Mississippi, the home of U.S. Senator John C. Stennis, a bevy of crooked local politicians, some of the finest people I will ever know – and Sciples’ watermill.

When we moved to DeKalb, there were absolutely no houses for sale or rent, so we lived in a room of the old hotel.  The window air conditioner froze up promptly at 3:00 a.m. every morning, and the “clang, clang, clang” of the fan hitting ice woke us up, so we were forced to turn it off and lie awake in the stifling heat until daylight.

After about two weeks, a man who worked for me and owned a little house in the country bought some property with a pond on it, decided to live in a house trailer there and offered to rent us his house.  We jumped at it.  This arrangement continued for about two years until Calvin – experiencing one problem after another with the trailer – decided he wanted his house back.  We moved into a friend’s basement. The mayor of the town had, tentatively, inherited a little two-bedroom wood- frame house (it was a cute little cottage), but it was tied up in an inheritance law suit.  He offered to sell it to us if he won, which he did about two weeks later; we borrowed $9,500 (a lot of money for two poor state employees then, but not even the price of a decent used car now days) and bought it. We had just moved into the house, without furniture, and were sleeping on a pallet in the living room on that fateful night, with plans to buy insurance the next morning, when the storm hit – and I learned the true meaning of neighborliness.

The old mill had a water turbine, rather than the more iconic water wheel (Anderson’s watermill had the same arrangement, although the folks who now own The Old Watermill Fish Camp at that location installed a waterwheel for looks.  Daddy said a turbine produced more power with less water and was, therefore, more efficient.). Sciples’ Mill had a wooden dam and a two-story mill house.  It was surrounded by a little village of houses and a country store. The tornado scored a direct hit on the millhouse, destroying it, but the machinery and dam were left intact.

A bunch of local people got together, combed the woods, and recovered enough of the remains to rebuild the millhouse, but as a one-story structure.  Today, Edwin Sciples (who is also in instructor at East Mississippi Community College in Scooba) operates the mill and sells cornmeal and grits to nearby stores.  The miller that I knew was Old Man George Sciples, who also operated the little country store.  He was a prankster and the store was full of gadgets and joke items.  His favorite was a crate labelled “Caution: Baby Rattlers.” He told the unwary they were welcomed to take a look, but to open it very carefully, but he was not responsible for what might befall them.  He would then step back.  Who could resist that dare?  One would cautiously open the box, gingerly peek inside; and, indeed there were two baby rattlers – not snakes, but the type babies shake in their fists to produce a rattling sound! He would smile a little wry smile and say, “I told you there were baby rattlers in there!” The Store is no longer open on a daily basis, but is now the site of the Saturday night “Sciples’ Watermill Opry.”

There was another water mill nearby – Thomas’s Mill – but it was no longer in use.  The owner charged twenty-five cents to swim in the pond.

When I was a kid, a popular “swimming hole” was Lake Waulkaway in Clark County.  It was well developed, with wooden walkways separating areas of different depths, diving boards, an extremely high diving tower (not for use by the faint of heart), a bath house and concession stand.  Just up the road was Lake Bounds, nestled between two bluffs.  The only development was a cable slung from the high bluff to the opposite, lower, one.  One could hold to the attached pulley, slide to the middle of the lake and fall in.  There was not enough fall for the pulley to make it completely across, so letting go and falling into the water was the only option.  The pulley was retrieved by an attached lanyard.

Lake Bounds was a mill pound, and the watermill still operated on Saturday afternoons. The two lakes had this in common:  Both were fed by rather large creeks that suddenly emerged from sandy hillsides and  were (literally) butt-freezing cold!  One did not get used to the water by slowly wading in – one JUMPED in, an event that caused the sudden constriction off all bodily orifices!  It is a wonder that the shock on an August afternoon did not send people into cardiac arrest, but I never heard of it.

The other water mill I know of is Dunn’s Fall State Park on the Chunky River, South of Meridian.  I know quite a bit about it.  Just after it was established as a state park I was writing for Forestry Forum magazine, a Forestry Commission publication, so I interviewed several knowledgeable people.  The fall was actually an old mill race, created by a potter named John Dunn in the 1840’s when he diverted a small creek over the river bluff.  He used the mill to pulverize local clay for making pottery.  It later grew into quite an operation, with the water wheel driving a gristmill and wool carding mill.  A village grew up there that contained a distillery and woolen mill (during the Civil War, wool cloth for uniforms was made there).  A hat-maker named John Stetson set up shop and that is where the first Stetson hats were made.  After rural electrification, the mill became obsolete, was abandoned and rotted away.  Only the mill race and millstone remained.  The state decided to make it into a park.  A Sailor at Meridian Naval Air Station had inherited a water mill at Cave Springs, GA, whose last use was to generate electricity for the little town.  He offered the mill to the state for $20,000.  The state bought it, numbered the parts, disassembled it, trucked it to Dunn’s Fall and reassembled it.  I interviewed the park manager.  He said they tried to grind corn by pouring it onto the stone, but it jammed, smoked and did not work properly.  They contacted an old man who was an experienced miller, and he showed them how to construct a shaker that applied the corn at an even and appropriate rate. With this in place, the mill worked.  The manager said there was a lot more to operating a watermill than one would have thought:  It is a skilled trade.

Well, folks, I think this fork is about to rejoin the main trail:  I believe that’s  L.D. Anderson’s Watermill  up ahead, but I don’t want to overstay my welcome.  We will get back to the business at hand in the next chapter.