Edited by Charlie Hoyer. Part III is the final part of a series on a brief history of the Tyrone Milling Company, covering the early days of the mill from 1836 to 1908.
In all times and among most peoples, bread has been regarded as the staff of life. Milling dates to prehistoric times when small family groups developed primitive hand techniques to grind grain into flour. When our early American settlers arrived in the New World, they either imported expensive flour or hand-ground homegrown grain until gristmills were established. It’s understandable why we have historically referred to the head of the family as the bread-winner!
Corn, Grist, and Flour
Most early farms in America raised grain: wheat, rye, corn, buckwheat, and barley. The grain was hand-sowed, hand-harvested with a sickle or a cradle, flail-threshed to separate the grain from the straw, cleaned in the wind with a winnowing basket, and finally ground with mortars and pestles or with a set of small, hand-turned stones called a quern.
Gristmills were constructed in the early 1600s to grind corn and wheat to make flour for the early English settlers of coastal areas. Two words in this sentence reveal what the mill was constructed to do. These words are corn and flour. To English-speaking people of the 1600s and 1700s, a corn mill meant a mill that grinds corn and makes flour. Corn is the English generic term for grain. The common American word for corn was maize. In America, the English use of the word corn did not change until the War of 1812, when the people of the United States wanted to separate themselves from England.
The term grist refers to any grain that a farmer would bring to a mill for grinding. A grist can be any quantity of grain. A gristmill usually would grind all grains; a flour mill generally would grind wheat or some other small grain into flour. Basically, grist is a raw material, whereas flour is a finished product.
Early millstones were made of native granite and were three to seven feet in diameter. Bolts to separate flour from bran and middlings did not come into general use until after 1750. Thus, the product of early gristmills was whole-wheat flour. The miller was not paid in cash, but in a share of the flour — most often a tenth — he produced for his farmer customers. “The miller’s hogs are always fat,” was a cliché in Colonial America.
Water Power
Before the advent of electricity, water usually was the source of power for gristmills. A gristmill used water from a dammed creek that was fed through a flume, such as trough or a pipe, onto a waterwheel — either overshot or undershot, depending on the situation. The waterwheel turned a number of shafts that rotated stones, grinding grain into the appropriate needs of the customer. Many waterwheels eventually were replaced by water-powered turbine engines — some of which turned the line shafts directly and some of which created their own electricity.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, however, the opening of the great grain-producing areas of the West, railroad construction, steam power, and the growth and concentration of industry eventually drove most of the small local mills out of business.
The Tyrone Forges Site
To continue the Tyrone Milling story… The fine water power afforded by the streams of Tyrone Township, in then Huntingdon County, attracted the attention of ironmasters who owned the adjacent ore fields. In about 1805, the Little Juniata River was used to operate a forge for John Gloninger & Co. This forge was called Tyrone, from its being located in that township, and soon achieved an excellent reputation for its products. The metal forged was procured from the furnaces in Franklin Township, which were under the same ownership.
In about 1807, a rolling mill, a slitting mill, and a nail factory were built on the bend of the river, below the old forge, which were successfully operated until about 1830. The water power to these mills also operated a gristmill, which was the only industry remaining when J. Simpson Africa’s book, History of Huntingdon & Blair Counties, Pennsylvania was published in 1883.
According to Africa, “The present fine structure was built in 1836 by William M. Lyon & Co., which succeeded to the Gloninger interests in about 1835. Recent repairs and improved machinery have made it the most complete mill in the county.”
Nancy Shedd, past director of the Huntingdon County Historical Society, recently retracted her statement in Part I of this series and related that, “In re-checking the Tyrone Township tax assessment records for 1815 to 1833, I found no evidence of a new gristmill being built on the Tyrone Forges site. There is a mill assessed to John Gloninger & Co. and later to Lyon, Shorb, but apparently it was not a gristmill.” Africa, then, was correct in stating in his book that construction of the gristmill in Ironville was accomplished in 1836.
Samuel C. Stewart was superintendent of the William M. Lyon Company’s interests from 1840 to 1846. Some time prior to 1897, his son, Samuel C. Stewart Jr., ironmaster at Tyrone Forges, purchased the gristmill.
The Beyer Family
To regress to the start of the century… In about 1800, David Beyer, of Maryland, moved to Pennsylvania and built a gristmill in Sinking Valley along with a brick house in which he started a family with his wife, Sarah (Crum). The gristmill was one of the first — if not the first — to be built in that part of the county. The house still stands (on Sunny Mead Farm). Near the house, the foundation stones of the mill still can be seen.
David Beyer sold the Sinking Valley gristmill in 1833, moved over Brush Mountain a distance of approximately seven miles to Charlotteville (near Tipton), and erected a gristmill there on the Little Juniata River. He was seventy years old at the time. His sons, Aaron and John, later built gristmills on their own. David Beyer died in 1841, whereupon Aaron Beyer then became proprietor of the mill. This gristmill, known as Beyer’s Mill, later was leased by the Fuoss brothers, William, Jacob, and George. In 1883, the brothers purchased the mill, renaming the business Logan Valley Mills.
Aaron Beyer was a millwright. He was a large, strong man who, it was said, could stack barrels of flour three tiers high, single-handedly. He and his wife Lydia were the parents of thirteen children.
A. Wesley Beyer and the Keystone Milling Company
One of Aaron and Lydia’s sons, A. Wesley Beyer, was born in 1847 near Tipton. He spent fourteen years in the planing mill business and six years in the mercantile business. In the early 1900s, he acquired a small feed mill located at Lincoln Ave. and 16th St., Tyrone (just back of the F. D. Beyer planing mill) called the Tyrone Milling Co.
After becoming a prominent businessman in Tyrone, Wesley Beyer, along with Samuel P. Eby and Reuben Tressler formed the Keystone Milling Company and, in 1904, purchased the Tyrone Forges mill from Samuel C. Stewart Jr.
According to an article in the August 30, 1906 edition of the Tyrone Herald, “The Keystone Company bought the mill and eleven acres of ground about it. The firmly built structure at once was improved in conveniences and size, and it was equipped with all the latest and most modern machinery for the manufacture of flour. Mr. Tressler, who is an experienced miller, is in charge of the plant.”
“The mill is a four-story building with basement. In the latter is the power machinery, the turbine system with water power being used and furnishing the driving force of 60-horse. The first floor contains the four double stands of rolls, and the machinery is of the famous Sprout-Waldron manufacture. The second floor is occupied by the purifiers and the wheat cleaners. The third floor contains the great storage bins and the sifters or sieve bolters. On the fourth floor are the elevator heads.”
“With a bin capacity for storing 4,000 bushels of wheat, and a producing capacity of seventy-five barrels of flour, besides buckwheat flour, cornmeal, chop, bran, and mill feed of all kinds each day, the Keystone Milling Company’s plant is an extensive one. The main product is the Golden Eagle flour, manufactured from the best selected winter wheat.”
“The company buys its winter wheat from the farmers in this section and they have urged the farmers to raise the Fulcaster, Fulty, and high-bred Mediterranean varieties of wheat, from which the best results are obtained at the mill.”
The feed mill in Tyrone Borough was destroyed by fire in 1907, in which Wesley Beyer nearly lost his life. Subsequently, he changed the name of the Keystone Milling Co. in Ironville to Tyrone Milling Co.
In 1908, George W. Kessler Jr., a son-in-law of Wesley Beyer, became a silent partner in the business, and then in 1917, took an active control of the company. In about 1924, Wesley Beyer retired as an active partner, which brings an end to Part III of the Tyrone Milling story.
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