Wheel of Yates Mill Stops Turning — For Now

The oldest building on NC State’s campus, and one of the oldest working gristmills in the country, is getting a long-needed upgrade.

Yates Mill, named after the family of a former NC State math professor, currently is without its deteriorating waterwheel, which was removed late last week from the centuries-old structure on Steep Hill Creek. The mill site, which dates to the mid-18th century, is the centerpiece of a public park operated by Wake County on land leased from the university, marking the campus’ southernmost boundary.

Once a thriving hub of information in colonial and antebellum times, the mill has seen its share of rough patches but is currently thriving in a hidden corner of Lake Wheeler Road, opposite the Howling Cow Dairy Education Center and Creamery where university-made ice cream and flour and cornmeal from the mill are sold.

According to Foster Davis, the park technician for education and an NC State graduate student pursuing a master’s in history, the park’s attendance is growing.

“From my understanding, we are back to pre-COVID numbers for attendance,” Davis says, “and steadily increasing.”

The first mill structure was built around 1756 — records aren’t certain — and survived the Revolutionary War. The mill was completely renovated in 1820 and survived the Civil War — barely, if local lore is to be believed.

One story says Union soldiers, who were part of Gen. George Tucumseh Sherman’s mostly peaceful occupation of Wake County, set the mill on fire, an integral part of the structure’s long-enduring murder mystery. One of its former owners, James Penny, was charged with beating a mill customer in 1863 over a $700 debt (nearly $18,000 in today’s dollars). Legend has it that the victim’s widow told Sherman’s soldiers her husband was beaten because he was a Union sympathizer. Soldiers retaliated by trying unsuccessfully to burn the mill down. Penny was acquitted in a Wake County court in 1866.

The mill was sold to the family of Phares Yates before the war ended and remained in the family’s hands until the late 1940s. At one time, it was owned by Phares Yates’ son, NC State math professor Robert E. Lee Yates, a popular instructor who joined the faculty in 1891 and taught until he retired in 1932. He was involved with the business of the mill but left all operations to miller John Daniel Lea, who ran the mill until it closed in 1955.

After Professor Yates died in 1938, the mill and surrounding property went to his wife. It was purchased after World War II by philanthropist A.E. Finley, whose foundation eventually closed operations at the mill in 1955. The Finley Foundation sold the mill to NC State in 1963, basically a throw-in to the 1,000 acres of land that became the Lake Wheeler Road Field Laboratory, which is home to animal and plant research units operated by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

As the field labs were developed in the mid-20th century, the land hosted occasional youth camps, and the mill pond was irregularly used for immersion baptisms by a local church. By the 1970s, the mill was largely abandoned and fell into disrepair.

In 1970, students of NC State School of Design architecture professor Donald Barnes helped create detailed drawings of the historic mill that helped kick off three decades of restoration. Work began in earnest in the 1990s, when the volunteer group Yates Mill Associates began raising money to build a $4.5 million, 174-acre county park at the intersection of Lake Wheeler, Yates Mill and Penny roads.

NC State leased the land for the park for a nominal annual fee.

A new 12-foot waterwheel was built and donated by local volunteer Jeff Sugg in 1993. Three years later, floodwaters from Hurricane Fran destroyed the earth and stone dam that fed the mill. The pond was drained and much of the preliminary work was destroyed, setting the opening of the park back by as much as a decade.

The most recent waterwheel was finally put into service when the park officially opened in May 2006. It is now deteriorating, and no corn nor grain has been ground at the site since the park’s miller retired last summer. A fundraising effort of $400,000 to replace the waterwheel has secured approximately $300,000.

Millwright Ben Hassett, one of the few craftsmen capable of restoring custom parts to historic structures, is building a new waterwheel of newly milled oak at his shop in Louisville, Kentucky. It will be installed at the mill in the fall, which will allow the park to continue its monthly exhibitions of grinding cornmeal.

The park, with a trail connected to the NC State Agroecology Education Farm, hosts several university programs, including the office of Yates Mill Aquatic Conservation Center, which studies endangered freshwater mussels in the 20-acre millpond. It’s also a popular site for classes studying plant life, waterfowl and the mammals that live in the park.

“NC State is a good neighbor to us,” Davis says, “and we try to be a good neighbor to the university.”