The Mill

224 pp. Includes 99 color and 178 black-and-white illustrations. The first extensive compendium of facts and illustrations on the subject. Mills of every type are covered--including gristmills, textile mills, sawmills, gunpowder mills--and in so doing, the book recreates the life and history of North America from the earliest settlements through the Industrial Revolution. After a look back at the very earliest mills (the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote an account of a water wheel in 15 B.C.), the narrative moves from European mills and their importation to North America to mills home-built by the colonists. Mills determined growth from the seventeenth century, when the Manhattan Island skyline was dominated not by skyscrapers but by mills, through the eighteenth century, when mills produced supplies for the War of Independence, to the nineteenth century and the development of vast manufacturing complexes by a new breed of corporate millers.