The Saw Mill

The sawmill was constructed in 1829 by millwright Theodore Farnum Elliot of Penacook, New Hampshire for his future father-in-law
Edmund Sanborn. This sawmill replaced one that Edmund’s grandfather Elisha (1710 – 1786) had invested in during the late 1700s and probably was sited where our gristmill sits today. (The History of Penacook NH, 1902 pp. 329-331).

The 1829 mill you see today was built using scribe rule mortise and tenon construction. It is 21 feet wide by 53 feet long and built out of both hand-hewn and up-and-down sawn timbers. It may incorporate a few reused timbers from the earlier sawmill as well. Interestingly, the sawmill at Old Sturbridge Village has the same dimensions as it is a recreation of the ColbyNichols sawmill that was built by Elliot in 1834 in Bow, New Hampshire. The Colby Nichols mill was washed away by the great flood of 1936 after being meticulously documented by the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) during the depression. We used the same drawings Sturbridge Village did to make our replica of the original sash or up-and-down saw which was installed in the mill after constructing the mechanism involving a pitman arm and a counterweighted cam run by waterpower.

Originally built as a sash (or up-and-down) sawmill, the carriage of our mill was 28 feet long, the maximum length that the original building could have held. The mill was converted to a circular saw in the 1870s. The current Lane
circular saw was purchased and installed in 1891 after being shipped by rail from Montpelier, Vermont to Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The conversion of the mill required the addition of a log ramp with a continuous chain to pull the logs out of the pond and onto the saw deck.

The carriage for the Lane saw is 36 feet long. Local legend has it that the longest timber ever produced by the mill was 42 feet long. The 54- inch blade of the saw has 36 teeth, and the saw turns at a maximum of 500 rpm. The 54 wooden teeth (rock maple) in the crown gear that transfers power from the vertical shaft rising from the turbine to the bevel gear on the horizontal drive shaft required 14 jigs to make.

The head for the current turbine is 12 feet, though we would like to have more. The dam itself has undergone extensive restoration. The wooden vertical plank core of the sawmill dam failed in 1997 and the building was removed from its foundations to provide access to repair the dam. Permits were secured from the state to rebuild the dam and the entire dam was removed from the stream so that a modern concrete core could be anchored to the ledge below the stream bed. The last pour for the dam penstock was made on February 8, 2002. The drystone wall faces of the dam were then re-laid and the building was rebuilt on the new foundation using new locally sourced hemlock timbers for its understructure. The superstructure above the saw deck is original. The first use of the restored Lane saw using waterpower was in September of 2006. The first use of the replica of the sash saw was in the fall of 2022.