And so it was rebuilt: a small post mill, simple in design and operation, with but a single pair of millstones. The tail pole, extending to the rear, ends in a wagon-wheel support that eases the miller’s task of turning the mill by hand to face the wind. Other millers sometimes had shoulder yokes attached to the tail pole, or pulled it around with the help of a small winch anchored to one of a circle of posts. The stairway from the ground up to the body of the mill, called the “ladder,” is hinged at the upper end so that when the mill is to be turned, a lever raises the foot of the ladder off the ground. When the mill has been positioned to face the wind, the end of the ladder is lowered to the ground again where it helps hold the mill against further turning. Beneath the body of the mill are the heavy timbers on which it rests: the horizontal “crosstrees,” the sloping “quarterbars,” and the great post, all hand hewn of well-seasoned oak. The tree from which the post is hewn was itself young when Williamsburg first became the colonial capital. A count of its annual rings shows it to have been a sapling in 1675, which makes it one of the town’s oldest “antiques.” [Illustration: _An eighteenth-century cutaway drawing, from Diderot’s great French encyclopedia, showing the structure and mechanism of a post mill. The artist has “lifted” the body of the mill a few feet off the post to reveal the pivot bearing on which the massive crowntree would in fact rest. Note also the power takeoff from the brake wheel for the sack hoist._] Mounting the ladder and looking into the mill’s lower or “meal floor,” we see that the post ends in a wrought-iron bearing set into another beam of impressive size that “crosses” the post like the top of a giant “T.” This beam is the “crowntree,” on which the framework of the mill body is built. Below the lower floor is another bearing or loose collar around the post to keep the body steady on its perch. The primary machinery of the mill consists of sails, stones, and the necessary shafts and gearwheels to transmit power from the sails to the stones. In addition, there are devices for braking the sails, for hoisting bags of grain from the ground to the upper or “stone floor,” for feeding grain at the proper speed to the stones, for warning the miller when the supply of grain in the hopper is getting low, for adjusting the distance between stones, and for separating the meal from the bran. The sails of the Williamsburg mill are of the early pattern in which the backbone of each sail frame extends along the centerline of the sail. That is, the area of sail ahead of the backbone—in the direction of turning—is the same as the area following it. Incidentally, windmill sails usually turn counterclockwise (viewed from in front of the mill).