Rock Creek
Park

History of Peirce Mill

In June 1985 the new miller opened the valve and water splashed down the mill race outside to fill the buckets on the waterwheel's rim. The wheel began to turn and inside the mill the teeth of wooden gears engaged, causing the main shaft that powered the grindstones to revolve. Kernels of grain dropped from a chute into the hole of the top runner stone to split between the grooves. In the basement the miller tested the trickle of flour falling from the sifter. In those minutes the machinery of Peirce Mill rumbled into life. It was a grand reopening.

Visitors to Peirce Mill today can see old wooden gears and massive stones. A living museum, the mill represents part of the 1820s economy of America, an era when men tapped power from wind and water. The handsome stone building is the last of eight mills that once drew power from waters along Rock Creek.

The mill's owner, Isaac Peirce (whose name was often spelled Pearce or Pierce), left his Quaker parents in Pennsylvania to seek his fortune in Maryland. After the American Revolution, he worked for Abner Cloud as a millwright, building and repairing the mill's machinery upriver from Georgetown. Isaac married Cloud's daughter Betsy. The first census of 1790 enumerates their modest family group: children and several indentured servants hired hands. After Maryland ceded square miles to form the new Federal city Isaac bought 150 acres along Rock Creek from William Deakins, revolutions patriot. By 1800 Isaac's holdings stretch from what is now the upstream side of the National Zoo north to Chevy Chase. In 1820 his household listed nine children, slaves, and four servants.

The Peirce Plantation engaged in number of profitable ventures---farming fruit trees, the making of peach bran flour milling, and animal husbandry. The spring house (located in the Tilden Street island) led spring water through a trough to cool milk and butter. The carriage house has become the Art Barn, while the distillery is a private residence across the street. The sawmill, miller's house, and barns have disappeared, but the well-preserved flour mill remains.

Early Automation

A mill stood there when Isaac Peirce bought the property in 1794 and a succession of millers ran it. In the 1820s Isaac and his stonemason son Abner rebuilt the mill, using blue granite quarried in the Broadbranch area near by. In the interval change had come to the milling industry. Early mills had relied on the miller's strength and his burly helpers to hoist sacks of grain aloft, as well as clean, sift, dry, and bag the flour. In Delaware an ingenious millwright named Oliver Evans devised ways to overcome the heavy labor of his trade. He rigged auxiliary gears to transport grain and to work cleaners and sifters. In 1795 he published The Young Millwright's and Miller's Guide The machinery in Peirce Mill reflects many of Evans's ideas-ideas that reduced man power needs by half.

Like the mill's business, the Peirce family grew, flourished, and then faded. Isaac's son Joshua Peirce* started a horticulture business supplying trees and shrubs to locations the capital. He built a fine stone house, later called Klingle Mansion, on land given by father at Linnean Hill near Porter Street. In 1841 Abner Peirce inherited the plantation and in turn deeded it ten years later to nephew, Pierce* Shoemaker, who managed the farm along with his jewelry business.

Rise and Fall

The 1860s were boom times for the mill as Washington's population expanded. But in the 1880s new, steam-powered mills with iron rollers began to mass-produce cheaper, whiter flour. In 1890 farsighted citizens led Congress to preserve Rock Creek's valley as a city park, adding the millsite two years later even while the mill continued to operate. Alcibiades White, miller, described the mill's last day in 1897:

I was grinding a load of rye for a neighbor when the main shaft of the mill broke .... The neighbor had to haul his unground rye away, and I guess he never got it ground.

Under park auspices, the mill became a picturesque tea shop, serving "Harding waffles." In 1934 the Secretary of the Interior asked that the mill be restored and it functioned through several National Park Service restorations until the miller retired in 1980. The grindstones were still until the new miller opened the doors again in 1985.

Isaac Peirce left the fruits of his long, industrious life to his children. It was his dearest wish, he wrote in his will, "that my children will ... endeavor to keep and promote ... harmony and peace." Something of that spirit is found at Peirce Mill in the balance of stonework and the building's symmetry. Welcome to Peirce Mill.