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Hi, this is Elizabeth with the Great Smoky Mountains Association
and today we're continuing our tour of Cades Cove.
We're going to visit the Cable Mill area.
The Cable Mill area is the crown jewel of this mountain culture museum.
Here you'll find year-round deer grazing in the fields,
a great visitor center and store, lots of historical buildings,
and a working grist mill.
Here's a great place to start your visit at the Cable Mill area.
It's the Cades Cove official visitor center.
Inside they have all the goodies that you find at the visitor centers.
Booklets, t-shirts, warm fleeces, and things like that.
But they also have rangers, so I'm going to find out if the miller is here today and hopefully he's grinding some corn
and we can go have a visit with him.
Park rangers are often on site with special interest exhibits
and ready to answer your questions.
Elizabeth: What are they?
Ranger: What do you think this would be?
Elizabeth: I guess I think its a wolf.
Ranger: It's a gray wolf.
Howdy, welcome to Aunt Becky's house.
Rebecca Cable was born here in the cove and lived her whole life here.
She actually ran a store and then a boarding house in the bottom floors here of this house, and later it became her residence
and she lived here until she died at the ripe old age of 96 in 1940.
Rebecca Cable's house was moved to the Cable Mill area
along with this barn and several buildings which were
essential to the settlers survival.
The corn crib, the smoke house, and the molasses furnace.
Molasses making was a big social event in the fall.
The sorghum cane stalks were cut and the leaves were stripped off
and then they ran the stalks through a roller like this
which was powered by a horse or a mule pulling that long pole around in a circle.
The water-powered grist mill sits on its original site and is still in use today.
Well, I have a very special treat right now because I'm here at the Cable Mill with Ken, who is the miller today.
Ken, tell us a little about the process of what's going on here.
Ken: We're grinding corn now. This is white field corn.
Ken: That's all the settlers grew here in the cove.
Ken: The process was that people would grow their own corn.
Ken: They'd shuck and shed it and bring it to the miller and he kept one-eighth of it for himself.
Ken: That was called taking his toll.
Ken: But he would pour it in the top hopper here and it would gravity feed to that little hopper and the shaft would shake it on down.
Elizabeth: Is the stone down inside?
Ken: Yeah, there's two of them. The bottom is stationary.
Ken: The top stone is the one that actually does all the turning.
Ken: Now these go back to 1868. They are original stones.
Ken: We go in about every 4 or 5 years and recut the grooves, redress them.
Ken: They were cut from granite here in the cove.
Ken: Just a chipping hammer and a hammer and chisel.
Ken: And a little metal wheel here in the front would raise and
lower your top stone, so that adjusts how fine or coarse you grind.
Ken: It comes out there on the far side, which whenever the people brought it to him in a sack or basket or whatever,
that's what they would take it home in.
Elizabeth: What was the main crop that they would be grinding here?
Ken: By far it was the corn. Wheat was a secondary crop to them.
Ken: Flour was for special occasions, church socials, Sunday dinners, things like that.
Ken: But corn was an everyday meal for them.
Ken: They ate it about three times a day in one form or another.
Elizabeth: (laughs) Whew! Like what? Corn bread, corn pancakes?
Ken: There you go. Making mush, mealing fish or vegetables to fry, muffins.
Elizabeth: So the building itself, this is the original building, right?
Ken: It is. This is 1868, built between '65 and '68.
Ken: It took about three years to build it.
Elizabeth: Tell us about how the river powers the mill.
Ken: This is what you call an overshot mill, anytime you have the water flowing over top of the wheel.
Ken: Back up here probably about 150 yards, it came off the main stream Mill Creek.
Ken: They dug a channel out, that's called a raceway.
Ken: Notice that joins the wooden flume here.
Ken: The flume goes over the top of the wheel.
Ken: There's alot of trial and error going into it.
Elizabeth: So once the wheel starts turning, what does that power in here?
Ken: Well, up underneath here there's six gears.
Ken: Originally they were all wooden peg gears.
Ken: As they could afford to, they did change over to these metal gears, and the big bull gear in the back has a wood frame,
but it still has a metal ring gear around it.
Ken: But that ends up giving us the 25 to 1 ratio, one turn of the water wheel is 25 to the top stone.
Ken: What we're grinding will go for livestock feed now.
Elizabeth: It will? So it will be used?
Ken: It will.
Be sure to watch Parts 1 and 3 of our Cades Cove Auto Tour where we explore the rest of the loop road.