Remember History for Future Generations, Logan’s Mill
In Huron County the enterprising nature of the original settlers is an amazing story. It will unfold in the museum at Logan’s Mill in Brussels Ontario. The museum will remember and honour the communities that grew up along the Maitland River. The river was important to the life of these settlements because it supplied so many basic needs. It provided a means of transport for their goods, travel between villages, as well as providing water for drinking, washing, maintaining their livestock and power to turn the water wheels of the various mills.
Arundel Elias Disney (yes, the ancestor of Walt Disney) built the first mill in the Maitland River watershed at Bluevale in 1847. Over the next few years more than sixty five mills were built all along the Maitland River. Grist mills and flour mills ground grain for animal feed and flour; woolen mills transformed raw wool into yarn for blankets and clothing and saw mills produced lumber for building. Of the more than sixty five mills originally in operation only a few are left. The grist and woolen mills at Benmiller were converted into an inn for tourists in 1974. The mill at Ethel is now an abandoned shell. Logan’s Mill was in operation until 1967. It has most of its equipment intact but is currently run down and has been used since its closure for storage.
The repurposed Logan’s Mill will celebrate the many mills begun by our early pioneers to grind the grains they planted for food and sustenance as the Huron Tract became populated. Awareness of the critical importance of these mills to the first generation of settlers has been lost as industrial methods changed and railroads and highways were built.
Given the rate of change in everyday life over the last century, the reconstructed Logan’s Mill gives us the opportunity to show our current residents and visitors how farming families survived 150 years ago. These displays will show the qualities in the settlers that led not just to survival, but also to the success of this wonderful rural county. The original settlers exhibited vision, fortitude, determination, enterprise, forethought, and ambition. These attributes resonate to the present day because they are still the same qualities necessary for a thriving society.