MILLSTONES ALONG THE CUYAHOGA AND OTHER STREAMS OF THE WESTERN RESERVE: ROCK TYPE, PROVENANCE, AND TRENDS IN USAGE

In the late 18th century and much of the 19th century, millstones were the most important and expensive manufactured component of mills used to grind grain in North America. The first millstones used in Ohio appear to be micro/cryptocrystalline quartz from the Pennsylvanian of SW Pennsylvania and the Tertiary of France, and, later, Appalachian Ohio.

However, in the Western Reserve (a large portion of northeastern Ohio once reserved for the state of Connecticut) stone usage differed. Granitic millstones were used for a number of early mills, including one of the earliest, a 1799 mill in old Newburgh (now in southern Cleveland). Other stone used for millstones in the Western Reserve included sandstone (the Devonian Berea Sandstone used for a Shaker millstone and for millstones in Akron), as well as local conglomerate (the Pennsylvanian Sharon Formation used for millstones in Portage County, Bay Village in western Cuyahoga County, and elsewhere), and (?)metaconglomerate (used in Akron).

Newspaper advertisements indicate that by April, 1825 composite French buhr millstones were being produced in Cleveland. And in 1830 a new mill in Bedford advertised that it used French buhr. The Cleveland Directory for 1845-46 records coastal (Lake Erie) imports as including just two millstones, but 1,929 buhr blocks (assumedly French buhr) and 20 tons of buhr block. A number of French buhr millstones remain, including one by the site of a 19th century manufacturer of French buhr along the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland and another in Chagrin Falls at Bell Street Park.

French buhr millstones in the Western Reserve are mostly made of pieces held together with an iron band; those made of local material are monolithic. This pattern is similar to that elsewhere in North America, as well as Great Britain. The composite and monolithic stones in the Western Reserve have several dressing patterns: quarter dress, a continuous spiral of identical furrows, curved (logarithmic dress), and straight (radial dress).