WS 3371 Fall 2007

I thought this part of the book was very interesting. It was extremely intriguing to learn about how mills were first established. Virtually all communities and towns arose because of mills. Either the mill was already built and people moved to that area, or a few people lived in a particular place and a mill arose to support them. Either way, mills were vital to the creation of this country. We would not be where we are today if we had not developed mills. On page 96 this phenomenon was discussed further. This part of the book discussed how settlements in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and even Kansas were influenced by the creation of mills. I particularly remember reading about the influence mills had on the economy. The book stated that 88 percent of all the capital invested in manufacturing in Wisconsin was invested in mills. I think this mimics any new technology. Something new and innovative catches on and becomes vital to our production because it brings about significant improvements in our way of life. Mills not only started the development of cities, it make our economy grow significantly while also creating a new and innovative means of energy that lead to further improved innovations.

Of course when mills were built more work was created, which led to a “better” economy. At what or whose expense? In the 1830’s people had little understanding how much impact they had on the environment nor was it convenient to think of the environment. When the environment is considered things become more expensive to build because new considerations must be taken. It is therefore, best to avoid the environment altogether. Fish migrations suffered as well as other wildlife as a result of mill frenzy. We live in this beautiful city with mostly industrial type building occupying the shorelines of the Mississippi; this is a mill city. I went to school on Nicolette Island and often sat by the dock smoking a cig before classes started and imagined how it would look like if it wasn’t for all the buildings and how it looked like before anything was built. Even looking at photos from about hundred years ago, Nicolette Island is completely different. More and more building are popping up in this small area and I think there must be a limit. I still go down by the dock to “get away” even though downtown is right there, but I think it wont be long before trees are stripped and concrete walls are put to support another high riser.

I found the counter-narrative to the mills in Chapter six quite striking. Even today there are immense amounts of timber being cut down in order to make goods and erect buildings. It just doesn’t make sense to me that so many trees can be cut down year after year but we still have forests. Even if one tree was planted for every one cut down, I would have to think that it would be years before that tree became “harvestable.” It just does not add up in my head that we cut so many trees down, but there are still more. Hopefully the DNR and the logging companies are keeping stringent records on tree populations in our country.

This counter-narrative reminds me of an episode of the show “Futurama.” The show is set in the distant future in New York City. It is a satirical cartoon in which the directors poke fun at how the future will be if we keep living the way we live. In this episode, the main character is walking down the street when he passes a tree. The tree starts to fade in and out like its coming in on bad television reception, but it is really a hologram of a tree. The crest on the hologram generator reads “In Memory of the Tree.” Although satirical, the joke has remained in the back of my mind as a distinct possibility.

I like to recall the sentence from chapter 5: entire community with the mill at its heart. which indicates that mills not only led to the establishment of towns they also encouraged the use or rivers to transport produce. I believe every town is started from a central heart or a central community which depending on each city's location or natural resources gift thus it might differ. In early development, technologies like mills, canals and trains are the center of the town. It connects the cities all together thus these places are where the trade most likely to occur.
What always comes alone with technology is the pollutions. People have started to know what new technology might bring as negative impact to the society. And since technology is the heart of the economic, it is so important that more negative impacts keeps coming alone. From the reading we can tell back in the early development, there are already people being protest against these technologies and how it pollutes our environment. Although we can't offer to lose our environment and heart of economic at same time, however we can find ways that might stop these technologies from harming our environment.

Looking past the environmental counter narratives, The creation of the mill also created many counter narratives within working conditions exploitation. After reading these chapters, I found that the mill, while a great device for technological achievements and as the building block for many prosperous and developing cities, it did not work in terms of its employees and influences on the city. I consider the mill owners almost as a communist group. They were in control, it seemed, of every aspect in a city. This is because the mill is the foundation for much of the wealth and work in the city. If the mill owner is not happy, then the entire city can be affect from it. Unfortunately, yielding such power can negatively affect the city. Interestingly enough, I also think that cities could have immediately done more to make sure that such a power would not be left to a rich few, but rather the entire city.

When it comes to mills, I wasn’t so surprised at how much of an impact they had in shaping towns and such, but I was really surprised to see how much legal power was given to mill owners. Specifically chapter five describes the Mill Act of 1713 which gave mill owners the right to build dams without worrying about how it would affect other landowners. Granted those landowners could just go blow up the dam as mentioned in chapter six, but still, that’s a lot of legal sway for just one person to have. I guess it kind of shows how important the mills were for commerce and trade, but it’s just another example of how people seem to concentrate their efforts and resources to one thing without worrying about the negative impacts. People were just so focused on building a mill and harnessing the power from a little stretch of the river and would just overlook the impact it had with flooding upriver and disrupting fish migration which in turn disrupted a popular food source. It seems kind of backwards to me that in order to build a dam and have a working mill, you’d risk flooding the farms of the people who use the mills.

It was very interesting to read about the two different perspectives on mills. On one hands, mills were the basis of societal growth. Cities were centered on the mill… not a fort or church, but a mill. I never really thought that the mills were the drivers of population growth, but it really makes sense. Mills (whether it be a saw mill or flour mill) provided a place for a market to exist. People could harvest crops or timber and bring it to the mill for money and for goods. It seemed like a win-win situation. On the other hand, I never could have imagined all of the opposition with mills! Over the course of history, it seems like the “costs” of these mills were swept under the rug. For instance, we don’t really learn about the negative impact of mills throughout our history courses. But, according to Nye, there were many effects due to the mills including: pollution, environmental impacts, and the exploitation of workers. Basically, the main idea I got from these readings is that everything has a cost associated with it.

It seemed like the construction of a mill could be seen both as both beneficial and detrimental to the wellbeing of a community. On one hand it was responsible for creating a better lifestyle for the average citizen. It also created uniformity in the production of products. Sometimes the presence of a mill would determine how long and how prosperous a towns history would be. But like all things, it had a dark side. The mill could be seen as something which introduced cheap energy to the town. While this may not seem bad on the surface, this eventually led to greedy and wasteful behavior. Since this energy was so abundant, people might not have been so considerate when thinking about the need for bringing new inovations to the lives of the growing communities. This process has gradually gotten out of control and has resulted in much of the overcomsumption that we see so often today.

It's hard to imagine a society that relies so much on the mill as the main source for energy. Today we rely so much on oil/natural resources to run our stuff that you imagine what will be the next source of energy/power that we will rely on. It almost gets back to the End of Suburbia film we watched and the depletion of petroleum.

When the book talked about the negative effects of the mill on the wildlife, I was trying to think of a technology that didn't have a some kind of controversy that came along with it. It seems like all technological advancements will have some kind of backlash from the public.

I guess I never really thought about saw mills or even just mills in general as being such an influential aspect to society. When you think about the development of communities throughout the countryside you typically think about trains and canals but not saw mills. I found it very interesting to learn that saw mills were commonly built first in communities rather than churchs. I guess this goes to show how much we as a society value economic development along with energy resources. We are so willing to harness energy and use it to our advantage economically that we over look the consequences. Such as the case with saw mills, we depleted our landscape of its natrual beauty and harmed wildlife in the process.
It seems as though all means of energy we utilize today have deteralmental effects on the enviroment. We have seen or learned about the effect mills and trains have had on the enviroment, so my question is, will we ever fully take into consideration the consequences of our greedienss for energy?

Many people talk about changing the landscape—whether we talk about how we travel over it or what used to be its natural state. Deforestation I feel had the largest impact on the landscape by clear cutting much of our land. Saw mills also had a large impact on where communities were located. Take for instance Minneapolis, it was built around the St. Anthony Falls for the milling company.

The textile industries were also booming around the same time as the milling companies. Some thought the two industries were a new frontier and others had different opinions like Nye, “the physical landscape surrounding it was no longer the desirable second creation suggested by the early Lowell; it was a squalid town in a polluted valley. (128). This shows that not every things is so glamorous during boom periods and that depletion is not pretty.

What has stuck out to me throughout this entire semester is how each new technology caused a ripple effect and played a drastic immpact in the economy. The automobile created a need for roads, that caused a need for vacation homes, that caused a need for industrial tourism and so forth.

In this case, the mill caused a ripple effect in which there were several of them: saw mill, grist mill, and flour mill.

The ripple effects are good and bad. In this case, the mill caused a huge effect on our environment. What I've thought about most as I've read these writing materials is if we've really weighed the pros and cons to all of our technologies.

Mills have always been interesting to me I am from a suburb of Minneapolis so I have leaned a lot about mills and Minneapolis the only thing that I feel I did not learn enough about was how mills changed the landscapes. One thing that I think is very interesting is how population centers sprouted up around mills creating cities. Of course when many mills are put up in a general area we start to see implications some of which as Nye points out are pollution which lead to environmental complications.

When I was reading the quote by Jefferson from "Notes on the State of Virginia" it lead me to wonder whether Jefferson was right about a connection between man's work with the land (simplistic when compared to today's careers and job opportunities) and morals. Has technological advancement contributed, as a key factor, to the production of morally corrupt people and superficiality? Would we lead more virtuous lives and achieve a greater depth if all of us were still working with the land, appreciating nature? Have we become so caught up in our fast paste society, generally brought upon us by technological advancement, to appreciate spirituality?

Are we a new breed of careless and selfish human consumers? It appears that way, but is it only because we have been provided with the means, or would the cavemen have denied our technology and its capability in order to preserve the environment? As technology was introduced and progressed this consumption of natural resources and destruction of the natural environment has exponentially increased. How do you stop this progression? I don't think we can, but I think we can change its direction. We need to begin to use our technological abilities to stop fighting nature in order to fuel the economy, and focus on saving the environment by producing environmentally friendly inventions to take the place of destructive technologies we use today.

It liked in chapter 5 when Mr. Nye said that “a mill typically attracted farmers who lived within 10 miles in any direction, the miller often kept a store. While the mill did its work, the farmers talked and traded.” (94). This sentence supports the claim that the mill was central to community involvement. Not only did a mill serve as the seed of a small economy, but also as a seed for the people of the area to grow and establish an identity; through the social workings brought forth because of the mill.
I also thought the counter narrative was very interesting. Sure, mills were the center of community involvement, but it brought many hardships to the workers in doing so. The controversy regarding the child labor laws I also found to be very interesting. Mr. Nye writes that “factory girls were commonly depicted as victims of unjust employers and lewd supervisors…” (126), tainting the grand history of the mill and its workings.

The mills really did provide the good and the bad. I'm not even sure how to form an opionion on if they were more possitive or negative. However if you look at it as a seperate technology without human interference this might all change. The technology was a positive technology but the owners could have had some work done. Perhaps if the owners would have worked harder to ensure a fair working environment there would not have been such a backlash to the mills .Leave it up to people to be greedy in the face of production and money. Maybe the owners would not have been has wealthy but employees would have had a better life and maybe been more cooperative. Why does technology make us so lazy and greedy?

I found it interesting that nobody seemed to adopt the water-based energy at first and still relied on manual labor. In this day and age we are so focused on getting things done "the fastest and easiest" way that it's hard to imagine ever having a desire to do all by hand (even though there is something more appealing about completing a task that uses "elbow grease"). I also enjoyed the fact that there had to be a clearing of the playing field and development of the town before a church was established. It's almost as though the church was a sign of hope and repenting for all that had been destroyed and all crimes that had been committed either by townsfolk or lawyers while these areas were being developed.
Isn't is also awe inspiring at how much pollution and devastation these mills caused towards the natural environment. Its as though people were completely blind to the facts until it was too late to do anything about it (Oil crisis anyone??).

I think it's interesting how mills moved from building the cities and towns around them with the lumber and jobs they provided to providing food and more economy to the city by producing flour. It is a complete contrast with how cities work today. We have the economy with fewer jobs that require less and less hard labor and production, and don't provide anything tangible product for the city. There are even fewer skilled labor jobs that once provided a livelihood.

I saw a similarity in the story of the mill to today's corporations while I was reading through the chapers. Even though the mills were individually owned and referred to as more democratic, it was easy for me to relate it to Wal-Mart.

Similar to the history of the mill, the counter-narratives of Wal-Mart and similar stores are being developed simultaneously to the narrative. Many families look at Wal-Mart as a blessing. The convenience and cheap prices make it a perfect solution to many lower income families that can use any break they can get. Others see the large chain store exactly as the counter-narrative of the mill, as a cause of environmental destruction and low paying jobs for local residents. Wal-Mart has been in the news for encouraging illegal immigrants to work for their stores while paying them less than minimum wage. Large companies such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks are among the largest purchasers of organic products; however, they use their elitist power to drive down the organic food and fair trade standards in order to offer cheaper products and increase profit. The mills had much of the power and could control much of the local markets in a similar way.

I found the reading very interesting. Truth be told, I was fairly unaware of the role played by the mill in the development of towns and cities. Mills played a large role in the development, and economics of early settlements. Many cities are located in places once sustained by mills. The mill gave birth to an evolving economic system that eventual lead to some of the largest and most prosperous cities. A distinct trend is becoming obvious; technology is the foundation of society.

The counter narrative was shocking. I would never imagined something as passive and natural seeming as a water powered mill could have so many negative impacts. Lumber consumption is something I am painfully acquainted with. Our family cabin is located relatively closely to a zone of extensive lumber harvesting in northern Minnesota. And I really hope that trees remain a renewable resource.

History can be so interesting. I've walked around the big old Pillsbury buildings along the river and marvel at its size and architecture. As a photographer, I enjoy seeing the old structures and cobblestone streets. But then I read about the choke hold that these businesses could have on area and the sense of euphoria leaves me. It must have been hard living around places that pollute the rivers. I think of the people that depended on the river for fishing. Putting in a dam or one mill dumping its saw dust into the river could produce drastic effects. But as the years go by it seems that at least some of these sites weren't permanently damaged. In most cases, rivers can regain their health if they're given the chance. But in cases where chemicals were dumped, this is not the case and guess who gets to clean it up? We do.

Chapters 5 and 6 discussed the effects of mills on early United States settlements. It was interesting how good areas for building mills such as water falls attracted not only a mill builder but established a whole town. When a mill is built it attracts the business of those who are clearing land or need sawn lumber to build structures. In exchange for wood the mills had stores with goods available for trade. There were grist mills that were part of many mills that allowed farmers to bring there crops such as corn and wheat to be processed. This promoted more businesses and a town was formed around the mills. Nye mentions how the settlers thought that nature was meant to be conquered and developed. Not only that, but they thought nature had intentions for them to establish a village with roads and systems. Chapter 6 talked of the counter narrative and that employment of women in factories. Early large factories were not looked at as good investments, farming was the preferred occupation. It was supposed to be a agricultural country however it as realized that manufacturing was necessary.

Chapters 5 and 6 discussed the effects of mills on early United States settlements. It was interesting how good areas for building mills such as water falls attracted not only a mill builder but established a whole town. When a mill is built it attracts the business of those who are clearing land or need sawn lumber to build structures. In exchange for wood the mills had stores with goods available for trade. There were grist mills that were part of many mills that allowed farmers to bring there crops such as corn and wheat to be processed. This promoted more businesses and a town was formed around the mills. Nye mentions how the settlers thought that nature was meant to be conquered and developed. Not only that, but they thought nature had intentions for them to establish a village with roads and systems. Chapter 6 talked of the counter narrative and that employment of women in factories. Early large factories were not looked at as good investments, farming was the preferred occupation. It was supposed to be a agricultural country however it as realized that manufacturing was necessary.

After reading chapter five I feel like the popularity of the mill is what first divided the North from the South. From all of the history that I have had in middle school and high school about the North vs South I only learned that slavery is what divided the two. This different perspective makes it all easier to understand. It was nice to read that we did not want our mills to resemble the English industrialization, but I guess it kind of did. My hometown in located on the Mississippi and we had a paper mill on it up until about seven years ago. The imprint that it left on our town will probably last forever. Located on the west side of the river, the mill employed many of the locals who lived on the west side of town. The west side is stereotyped as "blue collar" (which is quite true) and "white trash" (which is kind of harsh, but all of the wealthy families do live on the east side of the river). The employees of the mill did not get wealthy. The founding families of the paper industry in my town have mansions that are perserved by the historical society on the other side of the river.

For as far back as i can remember, i've always read books and seen pictures set in these older times and noticed the water-wheel mill. Growing up through my years this dependence on rivers and flowing (fresh) water was reinforced in history lessons and video games. Despite all of this information presented, i guess i'd never really realized how important mills were to a small town just getting off its feet.

Now-a-days with subdivisions and cities seemingly growing just fine wherever there is space available, the importance of mills and rivers just isn't there. Electricity and our advanced plumbing technology negate any real reason to live reasonably close to a fresh water supply. Having trouble? Make a reservoir, whatevs. These chapters were very enlightening to me, i guess is what i'm saying.