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went through that very mill, and back into the pantries of the people living here.
Year after year, the same pattern repeated itself. Yet no one does this anymore. It has receded into the past. There haven't been commercial, waterwheel powered mills like that in my lifetime.
This, the last functioning mill in the county, closed in 1956.
I had the good fortune recently of being able to sit down with a lifelong local resident who lived some of those summers around Fletcher s Mill, and, over coffee, hear a little about what it was like.
Lillie Corbin, a longtime Sperryville resident, was born and raised right next to Fletcher's Mill. There were originally five houses right around the mill.
These were her youthful stomping grounds: "I’ve lived in three of them down on the farm there; I was born in one of them, and when I was three years old my parents moved up into the next one. After I got married we moved up into the third."
The mill, and the farm adjacent, were Mrs. Corbin's childhood playground in the '30s and '40s: My father worked up there for 47 years on the farm, worked with horses and mules.
But the mill part, I don't reckon there is one foot in there that I haven't been in. It's a wonder us kids didn't get hurt in there, because we... Mr. Fletcher was the first to own it, you know, and he would always go to Culpeper on Friday, to the bank meetings and boy after he left we would have a time. We went everywhere. On the carts they rolled milled flour around on, we would get on these things and ride each other through the mill, around its belts, and go up and get up into the corn bed or the wheat bed and play for hours at a time. My friend's father worked there and so I weighed many an old sack of meal there too."
I wondered what the inside
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