What Goes Around Comes Around at Old Bale Grist Mill

For the first time in 109 years, the huge old waterwheel at the Bale Grist Mill here is turning again.

Erected in 1850, the 36-foot-diameter redwood wheel was last operational in March, 1879, when it was replaced by a more efficient water turbine. Ever since, the wheel has stood idle.

Now, after a nine-year, $900,000 restoration project by the state Parks and Recreation Department, the wheel is moving again at the rate of 3 1/2 revolutions per minute, powered by water pouring from an overhead wooden flume. The mill is included in the one-acre Bale Grist Mill State Historic Park here in the heart of Napa Valley.

Shipwrecked Briton

British surgeon Edward Turner Bale, shipwrecked in California, built the mill in 1846 when Napa Valley was famous for wheat, barley and oats, not grapes and wine. The big wheel replaced a smaller one four years later.

The mill operated with the water turbine until 1905, but in the years afterward, the giant wheel, a four-story frame mill house, adjacent granary and 400-foot-long flume atop a towering wooden trestle, became overgrown with ivy.

In 1923, Sara Lyman, widow of Theodore B. Lyman, who had purchased the mill in 1871, presented the old mill to the Native Sons of the Golden West with the hope that it would be restored and preserved as a historic monument.

The Native Sons removed the ivy, cared for and maintained the mill structures until 1941, when the property was given to Napa County, which began but never completed the restoration.

Bale Grist Mill became a state historic park in 1974, and restoration work resumed five years later.

As work continued, visitors who observed the restoration were invited to leave their names and addresses at the park with a promise that they were to be notified of the official rededication of the mill, now scheduled for Oct. 1.

Those invited to the rededication party will include wine country visitors from throughout the nation and around the world, said Bill Grummer, 47, ranger at the grist mill.

The party will include re-enactment of farmers bringing wheat by horse-drawn wagons to the mill to be ground on the original grindstones that were imported from France.

“We have a request in the current Parks Department budget to hire a miller who will operate and maintain the mill,” explained Douglas Kauffman, 39, Napa district superintendent for the department. “When the mill operated, it processed 4 1/2 tons of wheat to flour a day. We’re not General Mills. We will run the wheel in gears throughout the day to demonstrate the mill’s workings, but we’ll grind corn and wheat only for a short period each day, with the output sold at the park.”

Originally, the water from a pond a quarter-mile behind the mill ran through a ditch into the flume, then spilled into wooden buckets on the wheel. Because only one-fourth of the flume was reconstructed, the water is now recycled and pumped through a pipe back up to the flume.

Joe Marino, 37, restoration specialist with the Office of the State Architect, has spent the last nine years as foreman of the restoration project.

Replace Boards and Beams

“We put new foundations and supports in the buildings and dismantled and replaced boards and beams in the floors, walls, ceilings and roof that were weakened with age, replacing damaged and rotted timber with hand-hewn pieces identical to the original,” Marino said.

Most timber on the giant wheel had to be replaced, although the axle, hub and gears remain intact after 138 years. The flume and trestle that hold it are re-creations of the original.

Interior restoration of the granary is continuing. The four original grindstones need to be prepared and balanced, and refinements in other areas of the mill are under way in preparation for the fall rededication.