Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Those who frequent the Wallace area have probably noticed over the past month or so that work is underway on the town’s old picturesque Boney Mill.
The mill’s timber frame dates back to the 1700s, with the mill itself a landmark in the town of Wallace since the 1930s. “Boney’s Mill is a small, partially enclosed, gabled building framed by cross-based, 10-inch timbers and sheltered by a tin roof,” a grant application for the renovations reads. The building houses both a saw mill and a grist mill, both of which were used in times past.
Work on renovating the mill is thanks to a grant from SHPO, the State Historic Preservation Offices.
“This is the first year in my recollection that they’ve ever offered what I call a sticks and bricks grant,” said Wallace Planning Director Rod Fritz. “In other words, for construction. Typically, SHPO offers grants to do studies, … but this is the first sticks and bricks grant that they’ve ever offered. We applied for it, we got it. It was close to half a million dollars for projects that had been damaged by either Matthew or Florence, which the grist mill fit into that category.”
Once the grant was approved, for nearly $500,000, Fritz said the economy had inflated and construction costs had escalated so much that the grant will only pay for repairs to the foundation and roof.
“I was hoping that we’d be like the one in Raleigh, the Yates Mill, where we’d have a tourist place but it’s not going to come that far this time,” Fritz said.
Workers are currently doing pile wraps, so all the pilings for the foundation and the steel undergirding structure is being repaired. This is so that the building will be solid from a foundation standpoint, Fritz said. “And right now, as you’ve seen, they’re redoing some of the truss work, which is all custom. Back in the day, that was all hand-hewn stuff, so they’re having to cut every piece differently. They’re repairing the roof trusses, and then we’ll get a new roof on top, which will be a metal roof, probably red. Because I think the original one was red.”
Though the SHPO grant funding only goes so far, Fritz said there’s hope for the future that the entire mill could be completely renovated and become a tourist destination.
“It has some recreational value as a gathering spot for lectures or biological diversity stories or something to that effect,” he said. “That would be great.”
Over the long term, town officials would love to see the neighboring Rose House become something of a nature center or a parks and recreation center.
“It’d be fun to have kids come out there and go into the Rose House and get a little lecture about the biodiversity of the Boney Mill Pond and the birds and the mammals and the fish and how they work together, and why the mill would’ve been important back in the day to every little town that had commerce,” Fritz said. “It was a saw mill, it was a grist mill. I’d love to see somebody in a Smokey the Bear hat take them out there and buy a bag of corn for grits at the other end. But that’s way in the future.”
The renovations are about halfway done at the moment, and it will likely be complete sometime in the next 60 days, Fritz hopes.
“Because we have the pond lowered at this time, during the heat of the summer,” he explained. “It’s really the wrong time to lower the pond, right? Because the fish need the oxygen from the water running and circulating. We’ve got the pond lowered so they can work on the foundation, so I’m hoping we can get the floodgates closed back down to normal so that the pond level gets back up. So I’m hoping in the next 40-60 days that they have this all buttoned up.”
