Ep. 61 – Homesteading and Lessons Learned from the Watkins Mill Tour

Are You Mr. Watkins, the Lord of the Manor, or Bessie Mae, with the “Kiss of Death” on the Third Floor?

For our May workshop we toured Watkins Mill in Bethany, MO.

Watkins Mill is a 1880’s textile mill and farm. Mr. Watkins employed 50 people at the mill and about 50 on the farm during planting and harvest.

The mill was powered by a large boiler that used to be a steamboat engine boiler, hauled miles across the ice and frozen ground from the Missouri River. Belts made of buffalo hide go through the floors in every direction. All three floors of the mill building were powered off of this boiler.

The mill took in local wool and made thread, blankets, and linen for people to make their own clothes. The mill ran between the 1850’s and the early 1900’s.

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The house is a Colonial style Antebellum house with three floors. There are extensive gardens, a brick summer kitchen outbuilding, and even a brick drying building with racks for herbs.

Judging by his library, Mr. Watkins was a polymath. His library concentrated on natural science, livestock management, and economics for his day, as well as religion and philosophy.

The mill declined after the Civil War due to the railroad bringing cheap thread, linen, and clothes from the East Coast. People no longer needed to make their own clothes. The local sheep farms converted to other crops or moved their sheep farther away. So the mill became obsolete. It continued into the early 1900’s, but its glory days were over.

In the lessons learned we share that “everyone wants to be Mr. Watkins, the Lord of the manor. No one wants to be Bessie Mae, doing the Kiss of Death on the third floor of the mill.”

“What we really want is friends, family, material needs met, productive fulfilling work, and risk without guaranteed reward. That is what will give a life well lived, a life fulfilled, an engagement in appreciation, and seeing abundance instead of scarcity.”
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Chestnut seeds for planting, chestnut seedlings, elderberry cuttings, comfrey crowns and root cuttings. Adapted to the Midwest.

Seeds and trees have “memory”. They thrived and reproduced in a certain climate.

Often when you buy chestnut trees or seeds online, you have to buy from nurseries in the Northeast or Southeast US, or the Pacific Northwest.

Take it from us, trees grown in those climates do not do well in Kansas.

Buying from our Kansas homestead, with nut trees grown and adapted to the Midwest, will make them much more likely to be successful on your homestead or in your yard.

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