Grist Mill at Wild Cat Den

Hello, Yesterday, Leroy and I went on a day trip to Iowa’s oldest working grist mill.

We got a tour of the place and learned quite a lot. There is certainly a lot of engineering knowledge that goes into making it work. It reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine. When I looked that up, I found it did not really apply to this situation as his drawings were of things that got complicated but could be quite simple if done the most direct way.

Each part of the mill is dependent on another part to work smoothly. There were four floors to this building. We could see how the water powered the operation. In times of low water source, a boiler was used to make it work. Wild Cat Den is a state park and we did some hiking there as well as had a picnic lunch. I so enjoyed being out in the woods with the tall trees. Guess it reminds me of growing up on the farm and wondering the woods for entertainment. We did not hike all of the trails because it was quite hot out and I got tired. There was a nice map of the trails which listed the length, degree of difficulty and the expected time to complete. This park also had a camp ground. There were only spots for tents on electricity supplied. It looked quite inviting to us since we are tent campers. The only drawback was that there were no modern toilets. Paula