Mountain Island Mill: Days before the flood
Inside Gaston

By HENRY GASTON

Slim Rhinehart, one of my “upper 70” friends, came up the back path a few days ago – holler’n every other step (so the dog wouldn’t bite him). He comes up every few days to “help” me. A while back he came by and asked me what I was doing. I had to tell him “nuthin’,” ‘cause that’s what I was doing. Then he wanted to know if he could help me.

SINCE HE STARTED helping me I’ve found out he’s a real old-timer. Slim was telling me about working at Mountain Island Mill when he was a boy of 12. He got me interested in it and I wanted to see the place where the old mill stood – the mill itself got washed away in 1916. Slim folded himself up and grunted a little to get in my VW and we took off for Mountain Island, just above Mount Holly on Highway 273.

Tremendously huge pin oak trees tell you right away that they’d been there for many years. Thanks to Duke Power, they still stand. The dirt road leading us by these pretty oaks took us down to a hydroelectric power plant. The earthen dam holding the water for the power plant was built right where the old mill had stood, according to Slim. Slim showed me where the houses had been and where Reep’s store was next to the cotton warehouse – all of which was washed away. Slim said all the houses down by the mill on the river were brick houses. He didn’t know how many there were – just lots of ‘em. He lived in a house higher up on the hill that was made of lumber. When the flood came, the water rose up to their chicken lot up on the hill.

THE MILL ITSELF was five stories high and the water rose to the top of it. The mill had a silver bell, according to Slim, and had the prettiest tone to it. The bell was used to wake everybody up in the morning since they didn’t have a whistle. Slim said when the bell tower went, the bell rang three times before it went under – he knows because he was there. The bell went with all the brick and five stories of heavy machinery, however. Later on, Percy Roberts saw to it that the bell was brought back – someone located it at Rock Island on down the Catawba. Slim says they thought a lot of that bell. I called around and with the help of Mrs. Margie Wilson and Mary Warren, I found the bell is, in fact, still in Mount Holly on Catawba Street.

ACCORDING TO a research paper by Cecilia Clemmer, written December, 1978, Mountain Island Mill was built in 1848 by the Tate family. It stood five stories high according to a picture owned by Mary Warren of Mount Holly. Slim tells me that the mill made cotton twine, strong stuff for tieing packages, etc. The thing that struck me was the fact that the machines on al five stories were water powered. Slim said a big shaft ran along the ground floor to the water wheel. Huge leather belts (some four feet wide) ran off this shaft to send power to the upper stories. In fact, Slim’s father found a piece of the belt after the flood and used it to half-sole all the families’ shoes for 10 years. The water wheel also pulled an electric dynamo to supply lights for the mill.

According to Slim, the workers in those days always had a prankster or two around. To liven things up occasionally, they would slip up behind a feller standing close to the big belt, wet his finger off his tongue, reach over under the belt and barely touch it; at the same time reach over with the other hand and touch some unsuspecting “yarn” spinner. This would give him a real good shock of static electricity. I asked him if that wasn’t kinda dangerous messing around so close to those belts. He said, “I reckon not; nobody ever got hurt.”

IN TALKING to Slim, I can’t help but think I’ve been sitting and watchin’ an old movie, and he didn’t charge me a thing. The trip to see those magnificent trees was like a trip through Nardia’s closet. Slim told me he worked six days, 12 hours each, for three dollars a week. That was when he was all of 12 years old.

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