When Thomas Lee Purchased this one-acre mill site in 1743, nothing remained but the "old mill dam." By 1745, he had built a mill which operated-off and on-until the Lees sold Stratford in the 1820s. The names of Stratford's millers remain a mystery, with one exception: a 1782 inventory listed James, an enslaved African American, as miller. In the 1860s, Elizabeth Storke, Stratford's owner, leased the site to Muse and Jenkins, local entrepreneurs who built a one-story mill which operated until the early 1900s.
When the Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation purchased Stratford in 1929, the mill walls had collapsed, the wheel had fallen into the tail race, and the pond was full of trees. In 1936 the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) stationed at Westmoreland State Park cleared the mill road and pond site. Senator and Mrs. Jesse Metcalf of Rhode Island largely financed the rebuilding of the structure based on drawings by architect Fiske Kimball. James Ford Bell, President of General Mills, commissioned milling engineers B.W. Dedrick and Alden Ackles to locate suitable old wooden machinery which millwright John Fitz, of the Fitz Water Wheel Company, installed as a gift from General Mills. Stratford opened the gristmill to the public in October 1939, and it is still regarded as one of the best operating mill reconstructions in the United States.
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