ROBINSON SAWMILL HISTORY
from Harlan Green (T-5)

Some of us in Turkey V group restored the Robinson sawmill in Vermont during our 1964 Peace Corps training.  I’m sure there are others who can also remember the work.  I remember it was Mike Miller, Heath Lowry and myself who did much of the work.  I had worked as a journeyman union carpenter, while I think Heath and Mike also had done manual labor in our young and varied lives.

The Turkey V training group was headquartered at Sandanona, Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont estate near Brattleboro, where he was reputed to have written the Jungle Book.  (He had married a Vermonter and also built a large mansion just up the road.

As part of our training for Rural Community Development, (via The Experiment in International Living), we were moved up to East Calais (9 mi. north of the capital Montpelier on dirt roads) to live on a farm and learn some rural skills.  The people of East Calais were also interested in restoring the sawmill, among other projects, to have it as a kind of historical museum.  Others trainees did road work, built stone walls and a septic tank.  

The Robinson Mill was reputed to be the longest running water-powered sawmill in Vermont.  It ran until the 1950s commercially, when pond silting and wear and tear on the equipment forced it to shut down.  It was run by a water-powered turbine set at the bottom of an approximately 30 foot long penstock that ran water over the dam.  The rotating turbine shaft at the bottom was then geared to horizontal belts that ran the saw blade and a moving bed that held the logs to be cut.   

The upper and lower ponds, regulated by sluice gates, had silted so much there was only sufficient water to cut logs during the spring runoff.  Not only did the metal turbine itself need renovation, but the turbine housing made up of large bridge timbers had rotted.  We totally rebuilt the turbine housing and welded or machined the necessary parts to get the turbine working again.  I believe that Mike Miller even carved some of the broken gears from wood.

This all happened in August, September of 1964, before we shipped out to Turkey and to our villages.  The sawmill was again restored in 2003 after much fundraising effort via a non-profit.  I returned in 2005 during a rainy autumn day and took many photos of its being run.   The local Vermonters are real characters.  They recently did two male nude calendars to raise $500,000 to build a community center at Maples Corner (of which I have copies)!  They got the idea from movie, “The Calendar Girls”.  But since the women wouldn’t pose, Vermont’s men stepped up to the plate and posed.  Our farmer Stanley Fitch in his 70s was one of them….

 Harlan Green (T-5)