Mill, Culinary

Description

Ball mill. Barrel or cylinder of maple with six metal bands. two openings with removable doors with slightly curved lids. [Holds or held?] one iron ball 5 1/4" in diameter and three balls about 4 1/4" diameter.

Notes

The Shakers at Hancock, in the shadow of the Mount Lebanon medicinal herb business, grew few herbs for sale except large quantities of sage. [A note by Jerry Grant dated 7/25/1991 in the file states, "I had always heard that the Hancock Shakers produced so much sage because they supplied it to a sausage maker in the town of Pittsfield, MA, but do not have the documentation for this information."] Sage was sold as dried leaves or as a powder. The Hancock Shakers ground dried sage leaves in a water-powered rotating wooden cylinder called a ball mill. The mill crushed and ground the sage by the rolling and tumbling motion of a few iron cannon balls located inside each of two compartments in the mill. Each of the compartments was large enough to fill with over 23 bushels of dried sage. The interior walls of both compartments are still coated with a thin layer of powdered sage. A photograph taken in the 1940s now located in the Edward Deming Andrews Memorial Shaker Collection at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library (SA1324.8) shows the ball mill in the northeast corner of the second floor of the machine shop and laundry building. The ball mill is constructed of 1 1/2" hardwood plank. The surfaces of the planks show the distinctive marks left by the community's rotary thickness planer, a machine first used at Hancock in the late 1830s. Screws used around the hatches are non-tapering and hand-slotted, a style of screw rarely seen after 1850. These two benchmark dates suggest that the ball mill was made during the 1840s. In October 1945, John S. Williams, Sr., listed the "Pulverizing Machine 85.00" as one of several items he "Purchased at Hancock from the Shakers," and on an undated list of "Shaker Items paid for & to be Removed from Hancock, Mass" he noted that the "Ball Mill or Pulverizing Machine" was removed on March 15, 1949.