Photo Credit: Robert T. Kinsey and Lauren Long Photography
College is expensive. Not only is the cost of attendance and tuition pricey but the cost to maintain and operate the campus is as well. Believe it or not, college and university campuses are actually not that much different than the social world of the mill, which became the campus in town during the colonial and early republican United States.
As David Meyer notes in his article “The New Industrial Order,” American industrialization produced a landscape of mechanical and spatial integration. Production was organized around power. Like Hanford Mills, water powered mills built and framed their landscape around water supply and in turn communities formed around the mills. The mill became a nucleus around which communities developed and their size was a factor of the water supply present.
Like Syracuse, many college campuses are built around and linked by a quad. Syracuse’s main quadrangle is its organizing feature around which academic buildings surround and continue its east-west and north-south axis. So what was the spatial organization of a mill campus like?
As diagramed in this Popplet posting, Hanford Mills Landscape, labor was organized around the topography of mill sites and a landscape was built that concentrated on the most effective use of water power. The landscape was altered in order to bring water to the mill, creating a cohesive system between landscape and power. Hanford Mills was built around the millpond for supply and situated strategically so that Kortright Creek was parallel to the road. This industry was linked by transportation and access to roads and railroads was essential.
While it appears that the placement of a water powered mill in close proximity to its millpond would allow for the free access of water supply the system was much more complicated and expensive. After buying lumber, building the waterwheel and excavating the ground, the water had to be manipulated so that it was directed to the mill. After the water went over the wheel, it then had to be diverted away from the buildings and back to Kortright Creek. This assembled sequence included a headrace from Kortright Creek to the millpond which supplied the waterwheel as well as a tailrace that brought the water from the wheel back to Kortright Creek.
The Handfords built a dam to hold the water supply of the millpond and a wooden headgate that controlled water flow into the pond. Additionally, a low dam in Kortright Creek directed water to the headgate. While these structures regulated water supply, they were not cheap investments and did not account for having to dredge the pond and additional maintenance and repairs.
While technology has advanced, it is still expensive to power the mill today with water-power. At our site visit, the waterwheel, gristmill, sawmill etc. could only be demonstrated for short segments of time due to the high cost of waterpower to run the machines. While waterpower was and is an effective power source it just proves that campuses have been and will continue to be expensive. Lucky for us college students.
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