A few days before Christmas of 1961 we will raise a pen gate in a flume adjoining the Mill Pond in West Yarmouth, on Cape Cod, and a 250-year old water grist mill will again grind corn into corn meal.

And so, a vanishing part of Americana, especially old New England dating to our colonial days, has been restored. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been going by this little old building, especially in the summer, without giving it a thought but the mill’s visitors from now on, growing up in our modern world of television, jet airplanes, and high-powered automobiles, to say nothing of electric can openers, will get a glimpse of early America, a view of the simplicity of the mechanism, and the quiet dignity of the building itself.

The mill is the only one of its kind on Cape Cod, the few others being either windmills or outside water wheels.

The original mill was probably built about 1710 by John and Shubael Baxter, sons of Thomas, who arrived in Yarmouth from Rhode Island after the close of King Philip’s War. Originally a mason, the loss of a hand in the war made it impossible for Baxter to continue his trade, and he became a millwright. His will, probated in 1714, disposes of fulling mill equipment. This equipment was from the fulling mill which he built on Swan Pond, now Parker’s River, in West Yarmouth.

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He probably offered no more than advice to his sons when they built the grist mill near the South Sea neighborhood, but it is undoubtedly these sons who are immortalized in the little verse on the frontispiece of this saga. The poem was already old when Amos Otis reproduced it in his 1880 Genealogy of Barnstable Families.

The Baxter mill passed from John and Shubael to their children, Richard and Jennie, first cousins who were wed. From them, it went to their son, Prince, and from him to his son, Prince, Jr., whose guardian, David Scudder, sold one-half of the mill to Timothy Baker and his son, Eleazer, and the other half to Alexander Baxter, a remote cousin of Prince, Jr., through their common great-grandfather, John.

Extensive repairs were made to the Baxter mill around 1850. It is likely that Prince, Sr., who inherited the mill on the death of his father, Richard, in 1785, either made the repairs or caused them to be made.

After about two hundred years of continuous operation, the mill was finally abandoned around the turn of the century, the last miller being a man aptly named Dustin Baker, who earned the magnificent sum of 68¢ per day for his work.

The mill did lend itself as a gift shop and a lobster stand in the past few years, but as it stands today, completely restored in all authenticity it is doing exactly the work it did originally, with the same machinery, except the turbine which had to be replaced.

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