By Tim Richards
The miller was one of the early Cape [Cod] society’s most important citizens…. The mill and he were so important to the towns that they both enjoyed a tax-exempt status. Also, the miller was exempt from serving in the militia and in public office.
— Jim Gilbert, The Provincetown [Mass.] Advocate, April 4, 1977.
In seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth century America, mills ranked among a town’s most important institutions. As a matter of town business, communities offered incentives to secure and retain the services of skilled millers. The financial value of the Truro Tide Mill on Cape Cod in Massachusetts provides an additional dimension to this narrative.
In 1790, soon after the Truro Tide Mill went into service, one of its owners passed away. Samuel Rich’s estate sold his one eighth share in the mill complex to Benjamin Hinckley (possibly already a co-owner) for twenty-four pounds, six shillings. Converting pounds to 1790 dollars, that sales price valued the entire mill complex at over $850.
To put this valuation in perspective, in the 1787-1790 period two Cape Cod houses sold for an average of $165 and salt meadow adjoining the Mill Pond sold for an average of $32 per acre. These salt meadows were among the most expensive undeveloped land on Cape Cod, probably due to their value in producing hay and as a location for salt-works.
That the proprietors invested their time, effort and savings to convert valuable salt meadow into a mill suggests the opportunity they saw in tide mill technology. The proprietors were betting that their mill could attract high volumes of business, fulfilling customers’ expectations for flour quality, timeliness and cost. As it turned out, when the value of the underlying land is subtracted, building a tide mill created $546 of new value (which I will call “milling value”) and increased the selling price of the area by 2.7 times.
That the tide mill complex became 4.5 times more valuable than a house and a barn is not particularly surprising. More unexpectedly, the tide mill’s milling value was three times the milling value of at least one competitor, a windmill in Wellfleet purchased by Matthias Rider in 1801-1802.
What might account for such a difference in milling values between the two grist mills?
As a starting point, J. T. Trowbridge identifies greater dependability and lower operating costs as tide mill advantages and lower construction costs as a windmill advantage:
…tide mills offered the unique advantage of a water supply that was entirely dependable…. Compared to windmills, tide mills had the obvious advantage of not depending on the strength or direction of the wind on a given day…. [Windmills] were often cheaper to locate and build than water mills because no dam was needed; however, they were usually more expensive to keep in good working order over the long term.
From The Tinkham Brothers’ Tide-Mill by J. T. Trowbridge, 1882.
An additional aspect of dependability was the predictability of tidal power. The height and schedule of the tides could be predicted with great reliability years into the future. By contrast, predicting the wind beyond a few days was extremely difficult. Farmers may have paid a premium to know with certainty that their grain would be ground at the time they planned.
The Truro Tide Mill also enjoyed the logistical advantage of its location on a waterway off Pamet Harbor. Contemporary accounts indicate that Outer Cape towns purchased un-milled grain from southern states to supplement local grain production. In Truro, that grain would have arrived by ship within a few hundred yards of the tide mill.
Dependability, predictability, lower operating costs, and logistical convenience would all contribute to the difference in value between the Truro Tide Mill and the Wellfleet windmill. A final factor, which TMI member Bob Gordon and I continue to evaluate, might be power output differences between the two technologies.
These advantages drew business to the tide mill. Based on the prices Benjamin Hinckley and Matthias Rider paid for the respective mills, the Truro Tide Mill yielded, and was expected to continue yielding, three times the earnings of the Wellfleet windmill. If the two facilities achieved similar financial operating margins, the tide mill ground roughly three times as much grain as the windmill.
By enlisting the power of the tides to meet Truro’s flour production needs, Samuel Rich, Benjamin Hinckley and their fellow tide mill proprietors enjoyed more than accolades, tax benefits and perks. They also enjoyed the financial benefits of creating and owning the most valuable mill in the area.
Request to readers: If you have information to share about the valuations of other tide mills or wind mills, please feel free to leave a comment below.
About the author:
Tim Richards and his wife, Meg Clarke, discovered the site of the Truro Tide Mill near their home on Cape Cod. Read the story of their discovery in an earlier blog post, “Discovering a Tide Mill in Truro.“
This article and Tim Richards’ other articles about the Truro tide mill have been incorporated into a single research paper, “Ebbs and Flows of a Cape Cod Tide Mill,” published in the December, 2022, issue of International Molinology. This paper is available here with permission from International Molinology.
Now that I understand how a tidemill works I begin to wonder about the ownership structure. .. private ownership? Joint ventures? Cooperatives? I can see how cooperatives could evolve from the role of the tide mill in the local economy and not place the farmers into a dependent status on the miller or mill owners.
I am also now curious about the life span of your tidemill. How long did it operate and what led to its demise? Was it technology, steam energy? Did grain farming diminish in the region or did some other energy source outcompete the tidemill and cause its demise?
All great questions Al, and all subjects I’m considering for future blogs. On ownership, the short version is that the mills I’ve looked at were owned by either a group of individuals (all of whom would likely have raised crops in addition to their primary occupation) or you a single owner. The tide mill ultimately had 41 “shares” owned by around 10 “proprietors”.
The tide mill operated about 1789-1864 and would have lost business as sand bars encroached into the Truro harbor channel and as steam power became a more efficient alternative.
Tim