The Mill of Roadside America.
"Around 1870, no New England town was complete without a grist mill like the one shown here. In many instances, the mills still stand and continue to provide a popular subject for both professional and amateur landscape artists."
Perhaps the original inspiration for Currier & Ives: The Roadside Mill is found in "Wheat and Its Assciations," by T. B. Thorpe, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, issue 87, pages 301-314, August1857. It is titled simply as, "The Old Mill."
Where is the location of "The Old Mill?" One clue is that the water wheel has a covered roof to protect it from the winter damages of snow and ice. So the mill may be located from Northern Virginia, Northward into New York, and then perhaps New England. The mountains rising up in the background of the mill is an important clue. Those are not small mountains. The house or what could be an ordinary, inn, stage coach stop, or tavern build right along the road seem to indicate that the roadside is an old established turnpike, or highway. The big difference in the two images is the stone wall along the mill stream in the 1857 engraving became a stone bridge in the 1870 Currier & Ives lithograph of "The Roadside Mill."
The answer is located in the bottom right corner of "The Old Mill," is the name of the artist: "G. E. Dopler, Del. (Delaware), Roberts, S.C. (South Carolina). The image really is of "Roadside America."The question is, where and what happened to Roberts, South Carolina?
Winter in the Country.
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