The story below is an excerpt from our July/August 2014 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, view our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
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When E.B. “Ed” Mabry built his grist mill on a little creek in Floyd County in 1910, he could not have known it would become the iconic American country mill – the 16-foot waterwheel, shake-shingled roof, reflecting pond and a setting so gorgeous that postcards would one day feature the mill and the message, “Greetings from Connecticut” and “Greetings from Iowa.” It has since become one of the most photographed sites on the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway.
The mill was first restored in the early 1940s and has been rebuilt several times since then. But the parkway no longer has the staff or maintenance budget it once had, so last year it asked the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation for help. The foundation set aside $65,000 for dredging the silted-over pond and rebuilding the waterwheel while still on its massive axle.
Craftsmen from the parkway’s Historic Preservation Shop in Blowing Rock, N.C. scavenged the ideal wood for the project – an ancient white oak tree that had blown over several years earlier in the E.B. Jeffress Park – and milled it to specifications at a local lumberyard in February. Parkway Plant Ecologist Chris Ulrey measured growth rings of the massive white oak and concluded it was at least 400 years old and quite possibly more than 500 – meaning that the tree could have been a seedling when Christopher Columbus first came to the New World.
Work began in the snows and sleets of March and concluded in May. Journalist Jack Betts made more than 1,200 photographs as the Parkway’s Jack Trivett and Steve Marnie, backed by other Parkway staff, worked their magic to bring the waterwheel back to life.