The old outside wooden water wheel in the winter became lopsided with ice forming on the paddles and the uneven motion was undoubtedly disconcerting to the miller to feel the building and the machinery wobbling about. Whenever solid ice blocked the wheel, it was useless. Further, the mill pond was limited in its volume of water (“head,” to you engineers), so that when the pond was low there wasn’t very much water to turn a large outside wheel. Ingenious engineers of that era came up with the so-called “improved” iron turbine to rest under the water and under the mill where ice could not get at it and where there would always be some water in the pond to turn it. [Illustration: THE ORIGINAL TURBINE] About two or three months after we started reconstruction, my friend, George Kelley, came up with an old pamphlet put out by the J. Leffel Company of Springfield, Ohio, dated 1870, and sure enough the pamphlet referred to a “satisfied customer” as “J. Baker and Company, Hyannis,” who were successors in title at that time to the Baxter boys. I wrote to the Company in Springfield, Ohio, and much to my surprise received a most magnificent brochure showing they were still in business after all these years, now supplying turbines to great power dams, but ready to build a small turbine. I thought it very interesting that at least there was one company left that could turn out and furnish a small turbine. Everyone likes to play in the water, so we went to work about August 1, 1960. You can well imagine the condition of the mill. Windows were shattered, the sills were powder, the roof practically gone, and the building had a definite cant to the east’ard. It really looked hopeless. Fortunately, most of the ancient machinery--the stones, gears, brakes, and chutes--were still intact, even the miller’s little desk where he kept his records, and the ancient bin for storage. The beams, the corner post studs, etc. are of tremendous size and all mortised, tenoned and dowelled, and hard as rock. The stairs were worn paper thin; the floor was practically gone. Dirt and dust, of course, were everywhere. The stones are the French buhr type, which are practically impossible to obtain today, to say nothing of the fact that probably no stone could be obtained, except in upper New England, so many of the old mills having been raided and the equipment, especially the stones, taken away for steps and other decorative purposes. [Illustration] Eric Sloane, in his exceptionally fine and exhaustive research entitled “The Vanishing Landscape,” refers to the pattern of the stones, meaning the furrows or grooves cut in the stone, against which the corn was ground. Directly underneath the first floor of the mill were the remains of a wooden pit, which was filled with sand, gravel, and debris, accumulated over the years, particularly because of the raising of the adjacent State Highway from time to time, and more or less by the action of the elements.