In my mind's eye I can see the mill pond, the mill and the house. I have certainly heard enough stories. My mother grew up there. As a very young child she got lost in the woods one night. She had tagged a long with her older brothers to play at the other end of the pond. Like older brothers will do, they got frustrated with their sister hanging around and told her to go home. She got lost on the way back. She was found by a black man who helped at the mill. She was found only after spending a long cold night in the woods with only one of the family's dogs as company. Walter Styers, her father, was getting ready to drain the pond and start looking for her body just before she was found.
Mother had more pleasant memories of teams of horses with wagons going out on the ice of the pond where they sawed out blocks of ice and buried them in sawdust in an underground ice house. Mother told stories of iced lemonade and homemade ice cream made with the winter's ice. Their icebox and a spring house for cooling milk and butter was all the refrigeration that they had so iced lemonade was a real treat
Their water-powered mill ground both corn and wheat. I am almost certain that it was a grist mill hence the picture of one of the mill stones from the mill. There was also a cotton gin on the pond. I am almost certain that they also had the ability to saw lumber. Life on the mill pond was not easy especially for my mother who started cooking for the family at the age of eight. She told the story that once a month one of her aunts would come by and mix the flour and other ingredients to make biscuits. In the morning the boys would make a fire, mother would make the biscuits and one of the older boys would put the cast iron pan with biscuits in the oven. They raised pigs, had their own cow, made their own butter and had a large garden. Mother said her dad would buy a quarter of beef in the winter and hang it the smokehouse. It would freeze but they would carve some beef off for meals until it was gone. They did a lot of canning and dried a lot of apples. In the summer when they weren't tending the garden or canning, they would pick berries, make jams and jellies, and try to sell some berries on infrequent trips to Winston-Salem.
The trips to Winston-Salem were a two day affair. My mother said the trips were to take flour, cornmeal, and other things to the market to sell. It is hard to believe that a journey today which takes about thirty-five minutes with much of it by four-lane highway took two days back in the 1920s. Mother said that they mostly walked along side the wagon on a journey that was probably something close to thirty miles. They crossed the Yadkin River at Styers Ferry. Since it was run by Walter's father, Abe Styers, they would spend the night with Abe and Millie, his wife.
Mother once told me that she had picked a couple of gallons of wild strawberries and taken them to Winston-Salem for a lady who had ordered them at the price of twenty-five cents per gallon. When mother showed up with the berries, the lady told her that she had changed her mind.
Life was not too dissimilar from life of other rural families. All the children, four brother and three sisters, walked to school together and carried a large pail for lunch in their one-room school house. It very likely that there biscuits in the pail many days.
One summer mother, who was then a teenager, came back from spending a month with relatives in the Sand Hills picking peaches and she joined the whole family which was at a chicken stew just up the road. Somehow they figured out their house was on fire. They all ran home and mother was barely able to retrieve her suitcase which was on a table just inside the front door. She was willing to risk it because all the money she made picking peaches was in the suitcase. The only heat in the house had been fireplaces so the risk of fire was always high.
The fire was the end of life on the mill pond. It had been a popular place for fishermen. Apparently Winston-Salem anglers were willing to pay to fish in it. Once they moved from the mill pond and Walter eventually died, the property was sold and almost immediately the pond was drained. My uncle Henry told me that it broke his heart to see all those bass dying in the mud. My guess is that it did not make sense to rebuilt a grist mill and that the expense of a roller mill was one reason Walter gave up milling.
Years later, I walked with my mother, her sister, Mollie, and one of Mollie's daughters to the site of the mill pond. The only thing remaining was some of the concrete from the dam. I sorry I never got to see the mill pond, the mill, and the family that once lived there.
Walter Styers was my grandfather and a miller for many years. His mill was on a pond in Yadkin County, NC. The location of the pond was on Forbush Creek just off Union Cross Church Road which at the time was a dirt road. What I know about the mill and pond come mostly from my mother and some other relatives who have also provided information. My mother, her sisters, brothers and father lived in the house that Samuel Shore had built for Sallie Jane Shore, his daughter, who was my grandmother. My grandmother died in the flu pandemic of 1917-18. The family minus Sallie Jane likely lived by the mill pond until around 1925 when the house and mill burned.
When Walter remarried, he moved the family out closer to the road and took up dairy farming. I know little of the dairy farming years but that once a year Walter had a chicken stew for the Southern Dairy higher ups where apparently moonshine was one of the beverages.
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