HISTORY OF WINNEBAGO COUNTY.

bread. It was not until 173 years before Christ that the first
baker introduced the craft, and the first male baker was his own
miller. Larger stones were introduced and horse power, then
water power made to rotate one on the other. A pair of Roman
millstones were found in Adel, in Yorkshire. In very early times
in England the maid was the miller as well as baker, as King
Ethelbert made a penalty for "any man who should corrupt the
King's grinding maid." Sir Walter Scott has described the
primitive water mills for Scotland, and Dr. Johnson mentions
in his travels the crude water mills and that when they were far
away the housewife ground their oats with the quern or hand-
mill, which he describes. It was a toy mill consisting of a stone
with a cavity into which fitted another stone, having a hole in
the center through which the kernels of corn passed between the
stones and a handle with which to rotate the upper stone. The
lower stone had a spout below through which the meal fell to a
basin.
Improvement in the art and increased demand brought out in
very early times the millstone, or buhr stone as known for hun-
dreds of years in milling practice. The best stone was found in
France and made up of rubble blocks into a round wheel fifty
inches in diameter and one foot thick, bound together with iron
tires, dressed flat on one side and then dressed or grooved so
that when one is rotated on the other the picked or grooved lines
will act on the grain run through them like a pair of scissors,
"and thus the effect of the stone on the grain is at once cutting,
squeezing and crushing." As the kernel of wheat is composed
of five parts with several hard and cellular coats and the germ,
much of which is not wanted in the flour, this method of crushing
and pulverizing all into a mixed mass of fine particles made it
next to impossible to refine or separate a good grade of flour
from the mixture of bran, middlings, dust and germ. In Hun-
gary, the great milling center of the continent, they made black
bread. There was a tax laid on each run of stone and the de-
mand increasing, rather than add more run of stone they devised
a cutting machine to aid the stone. It was a set of wooden or
iron rolls having their faces fitted with numerous sharp teeth
or knives through which the grain was passed, cutting it into
shreds, which was then run through between the millstone and
ground to powder, greatly increasing the product of the stones
and saving the payment of the tax. This was a wheat sawmill
used to aid the stone, the only roller mill devised in Hungary,

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