The Intentional Sightseer

There’s a reason the word “unintentional” part of the name of this column. Most of what intrigues me, historically, is the unexpected line in a book or the unusual find by the side of the road. I do go to museums and historic sites on purpose sometimes, probably more than most people even, but honestly I’m not very good at it. I am, you could say, a bad tourist. I don’t want to follow the guide; I read the signs in the wrong order; I fixate on either the obvious or the silly, I fail to see the gravity of the place until I can think about it later.

I went to the Old Town Mill last weekend very intentionally, because it was the last of the few days each summer when the 1650 grist mill is opened to the public. And I was indeed a rather inept visitor. Walking inside, I noticed at first only the smell - not musty, exactly, but wonderfully old. I imagined it must always have smelled exactly like this, though of course it couldn’t have. Then I perceived that everything was small: the doorways, the windows, the stairs. I thought of New London founder and Mill owner John Winthrop Jr., and all the other men who had climbed those little staircases and labored under those low ceilings, removing their buckled hats and stooping at the front door.

Standing on the top floor, where the widely spaced wooden planks allowed slivers of light to shoot up from below my feet, I looked around the space that used to be the corn crib. The corn was hoisted up into the building, and I realized I’d seen pictures of the outside half of that process, but never imagined the people who stood here in the semi-darkness under the exposed rafters and hauled the corn in.

It is easy to grasp the basics, that the grain traveled down to the great turning millstones, and was crushed between them into meal, which eventually flowed out of the small chute by the front door. But the technology that made it work was far more complicated than I’d expected, although of course, as a useless museum-goer, I hadn’t really thought of what to expect. Looking around at the several levels of baffling parts and interlocking gears was like standing inside a massive wrist watch. Though there is something cartoonishly primitive about a millstone, there was nothing simple about the knowledge of those sometimes distant-seeming 17th century immigrants who turned corn to meal in these sharp, spinning, cramped rooms.

I went outside and asked obvious questions, such as whether the little stream of water running by the mill had a name. It is Mill Brook, of course, and there was once a Mill Pond, though now it is filled in and paved over. The original wheel would have been slightly larger than the one at the mill today; as it turned, it would have touched the water below. I considered myself at least somewhat competent for learning a new word, the name of the wooden channel which carried the water to the wheel: a flume.

My main fault as a sight-seer is that physically being in a place can make me entirely forget or hopelessly muddle facts which I once knew with certainty. The Old Town Mill retains, along with its antique smell, an air of determined survival. In a location where you’d think anything old would have been torn down long ago, vulnerable beneath the rumbling vehicles on the highway bridge above, the mill somehow seems so permanent that I managed to forget it had nearly been destroyed. There are a few buildings in New London that were spared Benedict Arnold’s wrath, and for a minute, in the warm afternoon sun, I thought this had been one of them. It hadn’t, of course: I’d even written about that for the . It was rebuilt shortly after Arnold’s 1781 raid, and was burned again later, and rebuilt again after that. It has hung on so well for over 350 years that it seemed to me, in my typical visitor haze, almost indestructible.

And then I left and vowed to reform myself, become a better historic-site-goer in future. But I don’t know if I will follow through, because when I walk through places like the Old Town Mill, even as a bad tourist, I always have such a nice time.