The Miller’s Tale

“Nothing around here is without a story,” says Paul, 60, who runs the mill with his son, Paul III, 29.

One of his best stories is his own, and how he came to own a piece of Usquepaugh history.

Prior to 1971, when he bought the mill, he had worked as a computer repairman. A back injury put him out of that job and out of commission for two years. The Drumms were on the verge of losing their home.

During those two years, Paul caned chairs and repaired antiques. His wife, Mary Ellen, knits, crochets and tole-paints, so they looked into the crafts business. They couldn’t have anticipated they’d find a giant antique--an 1886 gristmill along the Queens River called the Kenyon Mill Corn Meal Co.--when they began searching the classifieds for a crafts shop to buy.

“In the little local paper there was an ad: ‘Business opportunity: gristmill for sale,’ ” Paul says. “I mortgaged everything I owned and here we are.”

When he bought the mill, Paul gratefully inherited the skills of miller Charlie Walmsley, a Narragansett Indian whose father, Ed, had also been a Kenyon miller.

“I figured I had about a month to learn everything old Charlie Walmsley had to teach me,” Paul says. It turned out he had much longer than that. Charlie died at age 79 in 1983 after working 66 years as Kenyon Corn Meal Co.’s miller. Paul and Paul III (Paulie to his father) maintain that Charlie’s spirit is still here in the old cider house adjacent to the mill, where he and his wife lived.

“I grew up in Rhode Island,” Paul says. “There was just history all around. Every place you turn, there’s something old, including the food. My house in Wickford was built in 1803--and it’s one of the newer ones. You try to maintain all these things and not lose them.”

One of those things is place names. Maps may denote a village of Usquepaug on the Queen River, but natives know better. They insist on the “correctness” of a village called Usquepaugh on the Queens River.

There has been continuous milling on the site of the Kenyon Corn Meal Co. since the late 1600s, Paul surmises, long before the first printed recipe for johnnycake--a white cornmeal pancake that originated in Rhode Island--appeared in “American Cookery,” a slim book printed in Hartford, Conn., in 1796.

A cousin of Paul’s researched the history of the mill site and found a man’s will for the property was probated in 1711, the official founding date of the mill. The will left two gristmills and a woolen mill to the man’s wife.

“We feel it’s reasonable to assume the mill was there in the late 1600s because he probably didn’t build it right before he died,” Paul says.

In 1884, fire destroyed the mill that stood where the Kenyon mill now stands inside low stone walls that jut out into the Queens River (called so, Paul says, because the Indians who populated the area used to hide their queen at its headwaters to protect her during battles).

In 1886, a man named John Tarbox built the present structure. It wasn’t until 1909, however, that a father-son team bearing the name Kenyon began producing a bread-basketful of stone-ground flours and meals--including real Rhode Island johnnycake meal.

Charles Dickens Kenyon was the local postmaster and keeper of the village store. He would often look wistfully at the mill, conjuring a way to get johnnycake meal onto the grocery shelves of stores all over the state of Rhode Island. In the spring of 1909, he bought the place.

Immediately, Charles convinced local farmers to plant Indian white-capped flint corn--traditionally, the only kind used to make genuine Rhode Island johnnycake. (The Drumms now use white dent corn because white flint corn is difficult to raise.)

By that fall, Charles was shipping 25- and 50-pound sacks of Kenyon Johnny Cake meal to local grocers. By 1912, Charles’ son Archie joined the business and suggested packaging the meal in three- and six-pound packages to make it more accessible.

World War I rationing dealt a favorable hand to Kenyon Corn Meal Co.--it made the business burgeon and the public’s hankering for johnnycakes grow. In order to purchase a bag of wheat flour, shoppers were obliged to buy a bag of meal too--and most chose cornmeal.

During the 1920s and ‘30s, the Kenyons were making deliveries to Connecticut and Massachusetts. But Charles died in 1938, and Archie divided his time between a job in Providence and the mill until the late 1940s, when he sold it.

The place went through a succession of owners until it landed in the hands of another dynamic father-son team, the Drumms.

The millwork itself has changed little since the time Charlie Walmsley used to take the meal to Providence by horse and buggy. The two 2 1/2-ton sets of stones have been turning for more than a century and now mill between 60 and 100 tons of grain a year, the majority of which is johnnycake meal.

Perhaps the only difference is the use of white dent corn instead of Indian white-capped flint corn. Paul compares the loss of this one authenticity to restoring an old house: “So you’re going to restore the old house in Wickford and you’re going to use whale-oil ‘Betty’ lamps,” he says. “But where are you going to get the whale oil?”

Whatever the grain--wheat, corn, barley, oats, rye--it feeds down a chute into the hopper, down between the stones that grind it into powdery flour or nutty meal.

When the electricity-driven stones are turned on, the mill is filled with a cool breeze and the delicious earthy smell of freshly ground corn.

Paul puts his hand under the flow of meal.

“That’s the only machine to tell if it’s correct,” he says, sifting his fingers through the white cornmeal pouring out of the chute. He’s looking for it to be powdery in the area between his fingers (the most sensitive part), with a little grit on the tips of his fingers.

The flour or meal goes from the upstairs milling room downstairs to the sifting and packaging room, where it’s separated into fine meal and chaff, which farmers buy for cattle feed. It’s then hand-packaged and sealed with glue from a paint brush--1,500 one-pound boxes a day.

Russell, one of Paul’s six employees, emerges from the packaging room looking like one of Marie Antoinette’s powdered wigs. The corn dust, like the history Paul talks about, is everywhere.

This johnnycake recipe is one of the simplest. For more variations see accompanying story.

JOHNNYCAKE

1 cup white cornmeal

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups boiling water

Stir together cornmeal, sugar and salt in medium mixing bowl. Stir in boiling water. Drop by rounded tablespoons onto hot, well-greased griddle.

Cook 2 minutes or until lightly browned. Turn and cook 2 minutes more or until golden. (If mixture thickens, add more hot water to return to original consistency.) Serve at once. Makes about 15 Johnnycakes.

PINEAPPLE CORN BREAD

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup yellow cornmeal

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1/4 cup oil

1/2 cup pineapple preserves

1/2 cup drained crushed pineapple

1 cup chopped walnuts

Combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt in mixing bowl. Mix together milk, eggs, oil, preserves and crushed pineapple in separate bowl. Add pineapple mixture to flour mixture, stirring just until combined. Stir in 1/2 cup chopped walnuts.

Spoon batter into greased 9x5-inch loaf pan. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup nuts over top. Bake at 350 degrees 55 to 60 minutes or until wood pick inserted near center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes. Loosen and remove. Cool thoroughly on wire rack. Wrap and store overnight before slicing. Makes 1 loaf, 18 servings.