Part II of II
"We can't eat their flour" claimed Joe Piazzek's customers referring to the Oak Hill Flour Mill "about 60 miles below us and built at an expense of $13,000 for machinery alone" wrote Mr. Piazzek, continuing to relate incidents in his active career.
"I paid the Oak Hill Mill a visit and found smutty and rusty wheat there," he wrote.
"The proprietors showed me how they would make whiter flour out of buckwheat. I took the hint and bought a secondhand mill rig, all wood, for $40, a pair of 4-foot burrs for $80, made another wooden water-wheel, shaft and all and started my homemade mill February 1862, at a cost, all told, not including my labor, of $240. My customers could not wait, but piled grists (batches of grain) in this open sawmill building without doors for me to grind when ready.
"Finally we started with a smutter (apparently smut remover) running like double-geared lightening and made flour right away that they said was o.k. . . .
"The Civil War now shut off all our cotton. General Lane sent us seed and people sowed and raised small patches, and now another trouble began. 'Can't you gin our cotton?' By this time, I owned all of the mill. I got tired of being teased and ordered a gin from Massachusetts — paid $60 for the gin, $40 express charges — hauled it home and set it up, ginning for all — some as far as 100 miles away. The gin is now in the possession of the historical society in Topeka, Kan. The $240 mill ran for 18 years with little change on all-around custom, including the cities of Atchison, Leavenworth, Topeka, and regular big grists from St. Marie's Mission.
"In 1880, I built my new stone mill, costing some $16,000 . I also owned the upper Half Mound mill, which I sold just in the nick of time for $7,000 to help pay the depositors of the Valley Bank, of which I was vice president, dollar for dollar. The latter mill, a few years after, sold for $200 for junk. In my new all-roller mill, I happened to get my money back, buying wheat at 90 cents and selling flour at $4 a hundred and giving complete satisfaction. There are people living now who declare they never ate better bread than that made out of the flour I sold them.
"My honest miller, Mat. Glassel, stayed with me most of this time, also George Stanger, who lingered for 25 years from boyhood until he became a farmer. He now drives up occasionally in his auto. I often used to say to him 'Go make hay while the sun shines for it won't last. The farmers will get to be the aristocrats.' He says it came true.
"In 1906, I paid out on another bank run, caused by a 'smart alec.' There was some scratching, but I made it — dollar for dollar to the depositors, in spite of the fact that the Missouri National also went up with $1,500 of my money. I kept up and gave away one farm to a kin of 480 acres, now worth $50,000 and $60,000.
"Summing it up, I started here when I was 21 years old, worked like a tiger, made barrels of money, and now at 82 years old, have an idle woolen mill, an out-of-date oil mill, thousands in uncollected notes, a partly idle flour mill . . . quite a lot of land, which certain cheats had no use for . . . There must be something in inborn management acquired during mill tub times. Out of 10 mills once on the Grasshopper River, my mill is the only one left. The Oak Mill, although rebuilt and overhauled, did not, at the sheriff's sale, bring the price of overhauling. An appreciative public smashed all the windows, unbarred the doors . . . and there it stands, a wreck. My own mill contains some seven bullets shot through the windows lately." — Yours truly, J.M. Piazzek
The Valley Falls Historical Society Museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 18.
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