The Welker Feed Mill – Canal Comments

By Terry K Woods

Today’s column is of a mill once operated by water from a section of the Sandy & Beaver Canal in Tuscarawas County. It was written from a taped interview in 1975 with the one time owner of the mill in Sandyville. (1)

Now Sandyville, in itself, is a very interesting place. When the Bolivar Dam was erected in the mid 1930s this town was literally moved to higher ground. As a result, it is very difficult (spelled IMPOSSIBLE) to locate much of the canal or any artifacts in this area.

The foundation to the mill can be found and a a bit of that part of the canal that was used as the mill race until 1935 but very little else. There was a lock (No 29) in or near the town. It was rebuilt by the Lessees in 1872, but I have not been able to confidently determine its location.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 40 years scouring the area for that lock location. Last March I spent a portion of three days down there. As I say, I’m not sure I know the exact location, though I thought I found it once in 1985.

THE WELKER FEED MILL ON THE SANDY & BEAVER CANAL

Our mill was located near the bend in the Big Sandy Creek just to the southeast of the old center of the village of Sandyville. One cornerstone of the mill bore the date 1836. That was also the year in which the Sandy & Beaver Canal was being built across the northern portion of Tuscarawas County.

The canal crossed Nimishillen Creek in a slack-water pool a half-mile east of the mill. Even after boats stopped using the canal, the dam across the Nimishillen provided a steady water supply to run the mill and the guard lock on the west bank of the creek acted as head gates to the mill race. The mill race consisted of a half-mile of the Sandy & Beaver Canal bed and a channel of a 100 yards or so that had been dug at right angles to the canal. The mill sat between the canal and the Big Sandy and our tail race flowed right into that creek.

I don’t know who built the mill originally. I think a man named Rolland or Voelum owned it at one time. There was also a McKinney mixed up in it somewhere. The way we got it was that my grandfather had gone in on a fellow’s note and had to make it good when that fellow defaulted. The only way my grandad could get anything out of that deal was to take over the mill. That was in 1893. My dad, Theodore “Dory” Welker, moved into the mill in 1894. It wasn’t running then and he had an awful time making it go.

He hired professional millers because he wasn’t one himself. Finally, around 1900, there was an old guy by the name of Charlie Seibert. He came to our place looking for a job and my dad took him in. He was a miller personified and knew all about the milling business. He just kind of made his home with us for the next 25 years. Occasionally some big company would have trouble with their mill and Old Charlie would leave us for a while until it straightened out, but he always came back to our place. He kept that old mill running “like an Ingersoll”.

Dad originally called the mill the “Sandy Valley Roller Mill,” but it was known mostly as the Welker Feed Mill. I spent all of my boyhood along the canal and must have skated a million miles between our mill and the dam and back. The Canton cut-off (otherwise known as the Nimishillen &Sandy Canal) joined the Sandy & Beaver Canal along our section. They joined at right angles to each other. You could plainly see the towpath and that the channel was intended to be a canal, though I don’t know if it ever held water. I did a lot of trapping for skunk and the like in that cut-off when I was a boy.

I joined Dad in running the mill in 1918. Sometime between 1920 and 1925 we rebuilt the dam and guard lock. We replaced the original wood and rubble dam with one of concrete 154-feet-long. The eastern end of the new dam rested on the original stone abutments of canal days, but the western end rested on the earthen embankment of the creek. The western stone abutment from canal days lies 50 yards or so west of the concrete dam. At the time we installed a concrete head gate at the lock. The original wooden gates were still fairly intact. The lock chamber had been lined with wood and most of the planking was still in pretty good shape.

During the Depression, we ran the mill from 6:00 in the morning until midnight and never took in a dollar! Everything was done by barter and the only way we could tell our profit was to see how big a pile of wheat we had.

I was never too interested in the history of the canal when I was a boy, but I do remember the “Old Timers” telling about the old canal warehouses. I believe there were two that stood along each bank of the canal near the center of the old town near where our mill race left the main canal. They both burned down in 1898 and some say the fires were deliberately set to get rid of them.

When I was a young man, the B. & O. had a spur running from the Sandyville Station into Magnolia. A train went to Magnolia maybe two or three times a week to take groceries, pick up milk, and distribute the few passengers who wanted to go from one town to another. That train consisted of an engine and one car that carried passengers in one end and luggage and freight in the other. You could see a lot of the old canal from that train, maybe you still could, because those bottoms up there are really in no man’s land.

The State built the Bolivar Dam on the Big Sandy in 1936 and the old village and mill were moved to higher ground. That part of the mill that had been built out over the water was torn down and the rest moved to its present location in the northwest corner formed by the B. & O. Railroad and Route #183. The B. & O. tracks were also moved to higher ground and now cross the plain on a high earthen fill. That embankment now covers the junction of the Sandy & Beaver Canal and the Canton cut-off but you can still see faint traces of the cut-off as it comes out from under the railroad embankment and heads north.

Shortly after the mill was closed someone, probably disgruntled farmers, dynamited the dam – blew the whole center out of it. You can still find the ends of the dam as well as both original stone abutments and what remains of the guard lock. The foundation of the mill is still there at the end of the race. In 1933 we had built a new penstock and, in the winter, when there is not much foliage, it should be easy to find.

The mill had two turbine wheels; one rated at 43 h.p. and the other at 36 h.p. Both ratings were with nine feet of water. When we closed the mill we pulled both wheels out and sold one to Mr. Wilson whose mill is still up along the Ohio Canal in Cuyahoga County. He wanted the other wheel but when we went down there one day we found someone had broken the wheel up with sledges and hauled the chunks of cast iron over the mill race and away. The Depression was still going pretty strong and they probably wanted what money that wheel would bring for scrap.

My son Bob, came into the business in 1947 after serving in the Army. Dad died in1950 and Bob and I continued in the feed business until the Fall of 1972 when the warehouse was sold to the Morrison Brothers.

(1) As told to Terry Woods (on tape) during a hike in the area in the early spring of 1975.