Daniel Cragin Mill

Daniel Cragin was of Scottish descent. At the age of 21 in 1856 he was renting a room in the Putnam Bobbin Factory near the mill's location. There he made knife trays and wooden toys, which he turned into a full-time business. His initial cash investment to start the business was ten dollars. He soon turned a profit and in 1858 he purchased an existing small building that eventually became known as the Daniel Cragin Mill. The watermill was run on water power that came from two nearby water sources, Burton Pond and Nathan Barker's Pond. The building was originally built by Eliphalet Putman in 1817.[3][4]

By 1878 Cragin had added production of sugar boxes and dry measure boxes and had hired six others for his normal mill operations.[5] He soon mostly concentrated on dry measure boxes, since it was more profitable. His handmade round containers came in five sizes: one quart, two quart, four quart, single peck, and one-half bushel. By 1885 Cragin began selling these in full sets, or "nests", bound in iron bands. The containers were sold varnished, plain, or rough.[4]

Storekeepers, farmers, and fishermen needed a standard unit of dry measure for their trade products for barter and sales. In the late nineteenth century Cragin's reasonably priced dry measure containers were popular among these entrepreneurs. He was able to sell many containers and full set "nests" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eventually the national standard of measurement switched over to weights and the market for his dry measure containers came to an end.[4]

Cragin made a specialty type measure called a "piggin", a small wooden pail with a handle formed by continuing one of the staves above the rim. The wooden dipping pail was used for dyes in southern textile factories.[6]

Before electricity was readily available, the mill supplemented its needs with an 1871 one-cylinder steam engine for additional heat, to operate the kilns, and for additional energy for the steam vats. The antique engine is still at the mill.[7]

In 1909 Whitney Morse Frye and his father, Dr. Edmund Bailey Frye, bought the mill from Cragin. The name of the mill then became E.B. Frye & Son. Frye was educated in engineering at Lowell Textile Institute and Dartmouth College and received an engineering degree. With this knowledge he redesigned and invented machinery and techniques to make the mill more productive. Frye continued the Cragin line of wooden trays, boxes, and pails in addition to his normal processing of grains. Later he added curry cards (combs for cattle), wool cards, ice cream freezers, and Shaker-style pantry boxes.[8]

Frye later added hydroelectric power to the mill by improving the existing water-power system to include a series of pipes from Burton Pond and Nathan Barker's Pond to provide a controlled water force, or "head", to maintain a system to generate electricity. It furnished the mill's electrical needs as well as the electricity for Frye's nearby house.[8]

Harland Savage Sr. was first employed at the mill as a part-time worker after World War II. He was soon promoted to a full-time employee and then in 1951 to the general manager of the mill. In 1961 he purchased the mill and operated it until his 1981 retirement. At that time his son Harley and his wife Pam Porter Savage took over operations. They have operated the mill to the present day.[9]

In the late 1960s Shaker eldress Bertha Lindsay of the Canterbury Shaker Village asked Harland Savage Sr. if he would be interested in making Shaker-style oval boxes since the village's last skilled pantry box maker died in 1961. Frye's Measure Mill added these boxes to their line of Colonial boxes and distributed then to all the Shaker communities for gift shop sales.[10]

The mill is the only remaining operating water-powered measure mill in the United States after some 150 years of operations.[6][11][12]