By Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., October 30, 2026
With gratitude for the support of the Office of the Duke Forest, the sustained work of Sara Childs and Maggie Heraty, and the collaborative research of the Unearthing Duke Forest project team.
In the first post, Beyond the Deed: Indigenous Histories Along New Hope Creek, I began with the people whose relationships with this land preceded its deeds and continue today. Along New Hope Creek, a buried soil horizon and fragments, considered together with conversations with Indigenous elders and community members, offered evidence of earlier histories and past lives. Here, I turn to another clue on the landscape: the ruins of Robson Mill.
The remaining stones give us something solid to begin with. What stood here, and what did it mean to the people who lived and worked around it? I want to use the ruins as an entry into the history of the mill itself, to begin picturing a working place along the creek. Water moving through a race. Grain arriving from nearby farms. Flour carried away. Each movement depended on people whose lives extended well beyond the work we can imagine them doing.
I think of this as assembling the beginnings of a play: a setting, some of the scenery, and a cast of people coming into view. Their real lives were filled with love and loss, much of it unrecorded. We have no complete script. Some people appear repeatedly in the records; others are difficult to find even once. I want to make room for those lives while being clear about what we know and where our reconstruction begins.
The evidence comes in several forms. Stuart Dunaway’s research brings together the mill petition, land transactions, and changes in ownership. A marriage bond and a federal census schedule tell us something about people associated with the property. The ruins help us place this history beside New Hope Creek. Where the record is incomplete, histories of mills in old Orange County and the wider Piedmont provide regional context. Studies of milling elsewhere explain machinery and terms that appear in the documents. These comparisons help us sketch a working mill, but they cannot establish every feature of Robson Mill or identify the people who performed its work.
According to Dunaway’s research, George Johnston petitioned to build a mill here in 1793 and assembled the surrounding property through purchases and land grants. On October 16, 1811, he sold William and Edward Robson (more on them in a future post) 143 acres, including a water grist and merchant mill and its millpond, for $3,500. Edward transferred his half interest to William in 1814 (Dunaway, 2010, pp. 13, 21; Orange County Deed Books 14, p. 367, and 15, p. 10).
The 1811 transaction gives us more than an acreage and a price. By then, a mill and millpond were part of the property being sold. The creek had become a source of power for processing grain. To picture the setting, we have to make room for this working relationship with water, and for the agricultural land beyond the mill supplying the grain.
General histories of water-powered milling help put machinery into that setting. In a waterwheel mill, a channel, or millrace, directed water toward the wheel. Gearing carried the wheel’s motion to the millstones, where grain was ground into meal or flour (Wells & Frens, 2003). We can begin to imagine water moving, machinery turning, and someone attending to the grain, while leaving open the precise arrangement of Robson Mill’s machinery.
The description “grist and merchant mill” tells us something about the work of the place. As a custom mill, it could grind a neighbor’s corn or wheat and return the meal or flour, with the miller keeping a portion as payment. In old Orange County, the toll commonly ranged from one-eighth to one-twelfth of the grain ground (Anderson, 1978).
That exchange brings the mill closer to an ordinary household. Grain had to be grown and harvested, brought to the mill, and taken home in a form that could be cooked and eaten. A portion paid for the grinding. When I imagine someone arriving with grain, I also want to remember the people who would prepare the food and the people waiting to eat it. The work at the mill belonged to that longer task of feeding a family.
A merchant mill could also acquire grain and process it for sale, sifting or “bolting” flour into grades and packaging it for a wider market. Those functions made the mill both a local service and a commercial enterprise. The general milling histories that explain these processes may not all apply to Robson Mill, but they help us understand the language of its sale.
Regional history also helps us imagine the interruptions. Jean Anderson’s account of mills in old Orange County describes floods that damaged mills and dams, costly repairs, and mills standing idle. Water could stop the work as well as power it (Anderson, 1978). For the people depending on a mill, a damaged dam or broken mechanism would have meant practical worries: grain waiting to be ground, work to be done, and food or income delayed. We do not yet have that day-by-day account for Robson Mill, but these possibilities belong in our sketch of how such a place worked.
Anderson also describes mills as places where people met, exchanged news, and conducted business (1978). A trip to have grain ground could bring people into contact with others beyond their own households. That context makes me curious about the encounters at Robson Mill: who knew one another, what news traveled along the creek, and how differently people experienced the same place. The records reviewed here do not preserve those conversations.
The family and ownership records give us some names. William married Nancy Ann McCain in 1817; a Caswell County marriage bond dated August 25 records their names (Stainback, n.d.). They likely lived at one of the homesites whose ruins remain on the property. The mill stayed under William and then his son James Wesley until 1873, when Robert H. Sharp and John L. Tate became its owners. Milling continued until about 1913 (Dunaway, 2010, pp. 21–24).
That sequence is useful. It is also incomplete as a history of work. It allows us to follow property from one owner to another more easily than we can follow a person through an ordinary day. Even the marriage bond, with its glimpse of a relationship, tells us little about life at home. The records were made for particular purposes. Our questions about the people who lived here reach beyond them.
The 1860 federal slave schedule records William Robson as the enslaver of nineteen people. Eleven were children, including an infant about one month old. The schedule preserves William’s name, while recording the people he enslaved by age, sex, and racial classification rather than by name. We can document enslavement in his household. We cannot assign a named person to a particular task at this mill from the records.
The 1860 slave schedule. William Robson’s entry occupies lines 5–23 in the right-hand column of the original page, reproduced here as a crop. The record lists nineteen enslaved people without their names. Cropped from Appendix Figure A7. Source: U.S. Census Office (1860), Orange County, manuscript p. 16, indexed p. 426, July 10; M653, roll 925.
The entry for the one-month-old infant give me considerable pause. Someone knew that child by a name the census taker did not record. The schedule does not tell us which of the nineteen people were related, who cared for the children, or what losses their families had already endured. It gives us no account of their affection for one another. Yet these were people with relationships and needs as real as our own. If I picture only the work of the mill, I leave too much of their lives out.
Regional history makes the question of enslaved labor at Robson Mill essential. Enslaved people operated mills and performed difficult repairs in the North Carolina Piedmont. Enslaved artisans worked as carpenters, stoneworkers, and blacksmiths. At West Point on the Eno, archival research has identified William “Dink” McCown as a miller, including after emancipation (Anderson, 1978; Bandel, 2022; Bishir, 2023).
Research at West Point also lets us see something of Dink’s life beyond his occupation. He and Elizabeth “Betsy” McCown married in 1857, while enslaved. Their marriage received legal recognition in July 1866, after emancipation (Sperry, 2026). Their story belongs to West Point, but it helps explain what I am looking for at Robson Mill. A miller was also a person with a family. A marriage recorded after emancipation could acknowledge a relationship that had existed for years prior. Those relationships belong in our understanding of a mill community alongside its buildings and machinery.
These histories help us ask better questions about Robson Mill. They do not supply names or occupations missing from its records, but when we picture people working together, we need to remember the profound differences in their circumstances. The stones do not tell us whose hands shaped them, whose backs carried the grain, or who had the freedom to leave when the work was done.
This is the sketch I want to carry back to the ruins: a mill beside the creek, grain being ground, people depending on the work and doing the work, and households whose lives we have only begun to understand. Some of its details come directly from records of this place. Others remain possibilities suggested by mills nearby. There is still much to learn, but the questions give me more to look for when I return to the stones.
To understand this place, I need to look beyond the names written into its deeds. The next post follows records in which some of the enslaved people associated with this landscape appear by name: Lynn, Rebecka, Squire, Lydia, and members of their families. Following those names will bring us closer to the lives that an ownership history leaves out.
References
Dunaway, S. E. (2010). Johnston and Robson mill history: New Hope Creek, Orange County, North Carolina. S. E. Dunaway/Lulu.com, pp. 13, 21–24.
Friends of Orange County Public Library. Historic deeds. Orange County Deed Book 14, p. 367; Book 15, p. 10.
Anderson, J. (1978). A community of men and mills. Eno Journal, 7(Special issue).
Wells, S. W., & Frens, D. H. (2003). Lightfoot Mill. National Historic Landmark nomination, pp. 5–8, 13–14.
Soike, L. J. (1989). Flour milling and related buildings and structures in Iowa, 1840–1940. National Register documentation, pp. 6–7.
U.S. Census Office. (1860). Slave schedule, Orange County, South Side of the North Carolina Railroad, July 10, manuscript p. 16, indexed p. 426; M653, roll 925.
Bandel, J. A. (2022). Through the eyes of “Dink”: A reexamination of the history of West Point on the Eno. In Ribbons of color along the Eno River, 10(2), 34–49. Eno River Association.
Bishir, C. W. (2023). Hiring out enslaved Black building artisans in North Carolina. Buildings & Landscapes, 30(1–2), 99–122.
Stainback, M. (Trans.). (n.d.). Caswell County marriage bonds. William Robson and Nancy Ann McCain, August 25, 1817.
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