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Friends
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“ Nineteen towns in Whitman County had flour mills built between 1870 and 1910. Now only the Oakesdale Mill remains—it is the best preserved flour mill in eastern Washington. ”
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Fifty miles south of Spokane, the Old Mill stands along McCoy Creek in Oakesdale, Washington. Built in 1890, this four-story wooden building is full of intricate working milling equipment. In 1907, Joseph Barron Sr. bought the original Mill from Harvey Gray for $11,500, continuing the milling legacy his father, Moses Barron, started in 1862 in Barronvale, Pennsylvania. 
Joseph Barron, Jr. was born in 1909 in a living area attached to the Old Mill, and followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather before him by milling grains his entire working life, for 70-plus years, feeding the farmers of the Palouse and their livestock. There were three blacksmiths, three railroads, a jeweler, and a cobbler in Oakesdale when Joseph was growing up, but as farming became more mechanized, his market for the cracked grains fed to family cows, pigs, and outback chickens dropped off. People started buying their meat, eggs, and flour in grocery stores. Larger mills were rapidly taking over markets for brands like the centuries-old Barron flour known as “Sweet Home.” The 19 flour mills that once graced the area slowly died one by one. But the Barrons held on. Joseph had gone to work for his father right out of high school, in 1927. They survived the Great Depression by cleaning seed, storing grain, and selling coal. During World War II, Joseph Jr. got a deferment to continue the important work of providing food to civilians. Calendars from those years still decorate the office walls inside the Mill, above the original typewriter and safe. Notebooks with farmers’ names scrawled in pencil still hang above the bins alongside knot-free handrails, worn smooth. Exquisite machines fill all three floors, handmade in the manner and style of heirloom violins or grand pianos—treasured artifacts from an era when time was plentiful and people poured their artisan hearts into the making of everyday tools. 
Joseph closed the Old Mill in 1960, but refused to demolish it or sell the machinery; instead he placed the Mill on the National Historic Registry. He worked for a while in a nearby corporate grain co-op, but in survivor fashion, returned to his trade by purchasing a unique set of mill blueprints engineered by an English businessman who lost his mill during World War II as a result of bombing raids. In a garage-type building across the creek from the Old Mill and behind his house, he opened up for business again, this time milling organic flour, a new market that showed promise. Employing the Englishman’s unique design that uses centrifugal force at more than 3,500 revolutions per minute, the new mill explodes grains rather than crushing them. Small enough to fit easily in the back of a small pickup truck, it can mill 500 pounds of grain per hour. The old four-story Mill could do only 88! With his new mill and new flour, Joseph created an almost cult-like following of bakers. His milling process produced whole-wheat flour so fine it performed more like white flour. Standard whole-wheat mills require that moisture be added to soften wheat, causing it to go rancid faster. The mill doesn’t require the addition of moisture and also does the job at a lower temperature, both of which result in a longer shelf life for flour. During the early years of his new mill, he sold his products under the trade name “Nutri-Grain”—until the Kellogg Company talked him out of it. Needing cash, he sold them the name in 1980 and began selling his products under the name “Joseph’s.” 
Before his death in 2000, Joseph Barron, Jr. found just the person to maintain his legacy. He sold the Mill to longtime customers and fellow millers MaryJane Butters and her husband, Nick Ogle, of MaryJanesFarm in Moscow, Idaho. “I just couldn’t help myself when Joseph, at age 86, started to wear out,” MaryJane recalls. “For the three years we worked together (1995–1998) milling the grains and legumes I needed for the dry mixes I sold mail-order, he insisted on bending right to the floor to grab 50 pound sacks of flour and hoist them up onto his right shoulder. (His posture was impeccably straight and erect.) But it tugged my heartstrings to see how they weighed down his small and diminishing frame. Maybe it was that left-handed, loving bottom pat he always gave the sack once it settled onto his shoulder. Maybe it was the way he taught me to test for gluten and protein by slowly chewing on a mouthful of hard red winter wheat berries; the more it resembled bubble gum after 15 minutes of chewing, the higher the gluten content. When Joseph put his Old Mill up for sale, I baked up a plan that involved a state-funded rural rehabilitation loan. Sifting through dozens of prospective buyers as carefully as he sifted different kinds of wheat, in the end he announced, ‘I think you’ll do.’ When the sale of his Old Mill (along with his new little unique mill) made the local newspaper, they got two sentences out of him: ‘Never lost the place. Never lost it.’” Click here to become a Friend of the Old Mill. 
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