The First Four Decades of Milling in Chemung County

by Monica Groth, Curator 

Arnot Mill on Newtown Creek, painted by Mabel Shoemaker, 1973

Living alongside creeks, rivers, and waterways has its many advantages. A river is not only a source of food and a means of transportation. Its power can also be harnessed to perform work for millers.

Almost as soon as the area which was to become Chemung County was settled by Revolutionary War veterans in the late 18^th century, it became home to a number of sawmills – that is, mills which process lumber into wood for building homes. As past curator Frances Brayton writes, “even before a church or courthouse is built, the mill, by a rushing stream is set up and in operation.”

The first sawmill in the area was built on Seeley Creek by Abraham Miller in 1798. If his surname is any indication, Abraham might have descended from a family of English millers. He served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and was captured by the Haudenosaunee. Escaping around Seneca Lake on his captors’ route to Canada, Miller settled in New York. Historian Ausburn Towner names Miller “one of the most active, foremost and enterprising of the earliest settlers of the valley”.

Many equally enterprising settlers followed Miller’s example. In 1800, the first sawmills were built in Ashland and Van Etten. In 1805, Nathan Teall erected two mills, one in Horseheads and another in Millport. In the early years of the 19^th century, sawmills sprang up throughout the townships, as the plentiful lumber of the surrounding hills was harvested to supply the needs of the growing population.

Thirty years after Abraham Miller built the first sawmill, there were no less than 19 mills in Southport on Seeley Creek alone.

That year, Big Flats boasted 5 sawmills,

Catlin: 18

Chemung: 21

Elmira: 13

Erin: 4

Veteran: 36

This was before the Chemung Canal opened in 1833. Once completed, the canal greatly increased the efficiency with which lumber could be transported and greatly expanded the markets which it could reach. Trade increased and more mills were constructed to capitalize on this economic opportunity.

Lumber outside Rodbourn Sawmill in Erin, NY. Sawmills continued to thrive into the 20th century.

By 1836, when author Solomon Southwick published the pamphlet “Views of Elmira”, the area’s mills had modernized and were extremely productive. Southwick writes that the 6 mill complexes closest to Elmira produced nearly 20,000 feet of lumber daily.

You’ll notice I wrote of mill complexes – meaning buildings harnessing water power to perform a variety of different tasks. Sawmills used that energy the operate saws to cut wood. Grist mills used that energy to grind grain between heavy millstones. Some millers did both tasks, while other specialized in one mill type.

A mill pick like this one in our collection is used to "dress" or re-carve
the furrows on mill grinding stones

A millstone - most grist mills will contain two stones arranged horizontally atop one another. One, the bedstone, remains stationary while the other, the runner stone, rotates on top of it. Grain its poured through the center whole and moves outwards through the channels as it is ground into fine flour, which emerges at its edge.

Grist mills appeared in our county sometime after our earliest sawmills and were extremely important to the area’s first families. Though a matter of some historic debate, the first grist mill is believed to have been built by Daniel Carpenter on Newtown Creek around 1800. Prior to its construction, families would transport their grain south to a mill on Tioga Point to be ground into flour. Towner writes that grain was transported on horseback or more often, by boat, and it was “a tedious process in bringing it home up river”. “When the mill was built at the mouth of Newtown Creek,” Towner writes, “it was an enterprise of more necessity… than the completion of the Chemung Canal.”

Soon after Carpenter’s Mill was built, another early grist mill was opened by the Webb family in Southport (in the vicinity of the district which now bears its name).

Scale model of Webbs Mill, originally on Seeley Creek in Southport.
Webbs Mill was among the first grist mills in Chemung County

By Southwick’s observation, in 1836, the aforementioned mills nearest the city of Elmira were grinding approximately 800 bushels of grain a day.

However, there were still far fewer grist mills in the area than sawmills, and grist mills, performing a great percentage of their work to serve the local community rather than more distant markets, remained very important to Chemung County residents. When a fire destroyed the grist mill Sullivan's Mill (also known as the Tuttle or Arnot Mill) in 1836, The Elmira Gazette wrote that the loss of the mill and over 650 bushels of wheat would be “severely felt by the community, as there are few such establishments in the neighborhood.” The mill was immediately rebuilt the following season.

Working at the Elmira Knitting Mills

by Erin Doane, Curator

Elmira Knitting Mills was one of the first industries in Elmira Heights. It was founded in 1893 by five Elmira men – Matthias Arnot, Charles M. Tompkins, Harlan H. Hallock, Casper G. Decker, and William Bilbrough – for the manufacture and sale of woolen, cotton, and silk goods and garments. For 70 years, it was a major employer of hundreds of men, women, and children in the area. From the beginning, it drew in new employees with promises of steady work in a pleasant, clean, safe environment. The company was not always able to keep those promises.

Elmira Knitting Mills in Elmira Heights with employees, c. 1895

There’s no real way to know if the promise of a pleasant workplace was fulfilled. The company ran frequent help wanted ads in the local newspapers to recruit new employees. That may be a sign that it wasn’t as pleasant or clean a place to work as the company claimed. Conditions in the factory were likely similar to other textile mill at the time with stifling temperatures in the summer, loud machinery, and clouds of lint in the air that was impossible to keep out of employees’ lungs. In 1956, there were reports of noxious odors emanating from the mill property. The smells were coming from a pond next to the factory into which waste dyes used in the plant were dumped. That doesn’t seem particularly clean or pleasant.

Star-Gazette, July 16, 1956

The promise of safety is a bit easier to quantify. Over the years, various accidents at Elmira Knitting Mills made it into the newspaper. In 1895, a 14-year-old boy who had just started working at the mill that day was injured while riding in the elevator. He was looking over the edge when his head got caught between the elevator and the floor. Fortunately, a worker saw and was able to stop the elevator before he suffered more than a bad scalp wound, a broken chin, and several knocked-out teeth. In the 1910s, at least two employees cut their hands so badly on machinery at the mill that they had to have fingers amputated. In 1944, an 18 year old suffered chemical burns on his hands. That same year, a man lost two toes when his right foot got caught in an elevator. No word if it was the same elevator in which the 14-year-old was injured years before.

View inside the sewing department at Elmira Knitting Mills, c. 1900

The promise of steady work was one that was fairly easy for Elmira Knitting mills to keep during both World Wars. In 1918, the factory turned to war production. It manufactured 159,000 winter drawers and 13,000 winter undershirts for soldiers fighting in the Great War. The recession after 1920 brought hard times, but the company was able to partially overcome its financial problems by introducing the production of women’s rayon underwear. When World War II came around, the company received lucrative contacts to produce gloves, sweaters, underwear, and other clothing for the U.S. military.

Display of products of Elmira Knitting Mills, 1944

In 1945, right after the war, the plant underwent major upgrades. New sewing machines, new tables, and better lighting were added. Changes were also made in how employees worked. Better groupings of workers on single projects were made, rest periods of 10 minutes were added in mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and a public address system played music for about 15 minutes each hour. The previous staff of about 350 was reduced to 250, but production increased because of the improvements that had been made. So, for about 100 employees, work abruptly stopped being steady.

Elmira Knitting Mills, 1941

Despite the reduction in the workforce, Elmira Knitting Mills enjoyed post-war prosperity for years. In 1957, the mill manufactured 120,000 cotton garments a week including shirts, panties for women, children’s sports shirts, pajamas, and children’s bibs. It produced 25 different items in all. It sold primarily to chain stores, but also did work for the military, making over 12 million shirts for the Army, Navy, and Marines. The company did about $2.5 million in business a year.

By the early 1960s, however, business went into steep decline because of increased competition and the loss of major contract from two of the company’s large customers. In September 1963, Elmira Knitting Mills closed its doors for good.