From Gilmore Creek to the Railway: The Flour Mills That Fed Early Tumut

Before flour could reach Tumut in regular consignments by rail or motor transport, the district depended on local wheat, mill machinery and people who knew how to turn grain into a dependable staple. A flour mill therefore occupied an important position in the colonial economy. It served farmers who needed a market for wheat, families and bakers who needed flour, and carriers who moved grain and finished produce along difficult inland roads.

Tumut’s milling history was not, however, the story of one building or one uninterrupted business. The surviving evidence points to several enterprises on Gilmore Creek, at Mill Angle and, eventually, beside the Tumut railway yard. Later accounts sometimes combine these mills or transfer owners from one establishment to another. The broad development is clear, but parts of the chronology remain open to correction.

The reported beginning on Gilmore Creek

The historical date attached to this record, 1846, comes from the Reverend J. D. French’s retrospective account, *Discovery and Early history of Tumut Valley*. French wrote that the success of local wheat growing encouraged Francis Foord and a Mr Moore to erect a flour mill on Gilmore Creek in that year. His account also describes wheat being cut with reaping hooks and threshed with flails or by horses and bullocks.

This is valuable local testimony, but it was recorded more than a century after the mill’s reported establishment. No contemporary notice confirming the 1846 construction has yet been located. A separate biographical tradition associates Foord with a man named Moon rather than Moore. It is not known whether Moore and Moon were confused during transcription or recollection, whether the partnership changed, or whether the accounts refer to different undertakings.

There was certainly interest in water-powered milling around Tumut during this period. The Australian Watermills survey records plans made in February 1847 for a watermill on the Tumut River involving George Shelley, Francis Watkins and Robert Bourne & Co. The available entry establishes the proposal, not the completion of a working mill. It nevertheless shows that settlers were looking for ways to harness local waterways for grain processing soon after the date traditionally assigned to Foord and Moore’s enterprise.

A busy but uncertain milling landscape

Better documentary evidence appears in the late 1850s. In October 1857, a Mr Moon was reported to have a small water-powered flour mill operating at Tumut. The Australian Watermills survey cautiously suggests that this may have been the Victoria Water Mill, but the identification has not been proved.

The Victoria Water Mill was leased by the Hayes brothers in December 1858. They announced that machinery similar to that used at their Gundagai mill was to be installed and that wheat would be accepted for grinding from 1 January 1859. The brothers were still associated with the mill in August 1859. These notices confirm an operating commercial mill, but do not securely connect it with Francis Foord, Mr Moore, the Moon family or the later Mill Angle business.

Another substantial watermill property on Gilmore Creek was offered for auction in November 1858. It occupied about four hectares roughly eight kilometres from Tumut, beside the road then leading towards Adelong. Its equipment included two pairs of millstones and the machinery needed to work them.

The property was more than an industrial building. It included a recently completed slab-and-shingle inn, a detached kitchen, stockyard and garden, together with an unfinished residence. Such a combination made practical sense on a country road. Farmers and carriers might wait while grain was weighed or ground, while travellers, workers and draught animals all required food, shelter and water. The mill could therefore become a small service centre as well as a place of production.

It has not been conclusively established whether this auction property was the mill attributed to Foord and Moore, Moon’s mill, the Victoria Water Mill or another Gilmore enterprise.

Fred Body’s mill at Mill Angle

French’s account gives 1853 as the year in which Tumut storekeeper Fred Body erected a flour mill at Mill Angle. One online transcription calls it a “stream flour mill”. That could describe water power, but it may also be a transcription of “steam”. Until an original copy or contemporary notice is examined, the mill’s initial power source should not be stated as settled fact.

Mill Angle lay within the river-flat area associated with Tumut’s earliest European township. A mill there was well placed to receive grain from nearby farms and serve the developing settlement. If steam powered, it would also have been less dependent on creek flow than the Gilmore watermills, although an engine required fuel, maintenance and machinery that was expensive to transport inland.

The same retrospective history says that the Mill Angle mill was operated for a time by Ah Chee, described as a Chinese businessman, and later by Allsop & Co. Ah Chee’s reported involvement is locally significant because it places a Chinese operator within one of Tumut’s essential processing industries. However, no contemporary advertisement, rate-book entry or title record confirming his role or its dates was found during this research. The association should therefore be preserved as local historical testimony rather than presented as a fully documented ownership sequence.

James Simmers and the reputation of Tumut flour

James Simmers provides the strongest documented personal connection between the Gilmore and Tumut mills. His obituary, published by the Tumut and Adelong Times in June 1916, states that he was born at Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1828, arrived in Victoria in 1857 and came to Adelong in 1860. After about a decade of hydraulic gold mining, he turned to milling.

The obituary says that Simmers carried on the Gilmore flour mills for several years and then purchased the steam mills at Tumut. It also reports that his flour regularly won prizes at agricultural shows. Although the obituary supplies no precise dates for the changes, it demonstrates that Simmers worked at both places and that Tumut flour had become a product judged for quality, not merely produced for immediate subsistence.

Later notes associated with the obituary place Simmers at the Gilmore watermill from about 1867 and then at the Mill Angle steam mill. They describe two pairs of stones, two pairs of rollers and a workforce of nine. Those details are useful leads, but their original documentary source has not been identified and they should not yet be treated as equivalent to the newspaper obituary.

Simmers’s standing extended beyond milling. He became one of the first members of Tumut Municipal Council and was active in the Presbyterian Church and the Masonic Lodge. His career illustrates the position a successful miller could occupy between farmers, merchants, employees and consumers in a growing country town.

James Moon and the movement of milling skills

The Moon family connected Gilmore, Adelong Crossing and Tumut through practical milling experience. James Moon’s 1907 obituary states that he learned the trade from his father, Henry Moon, who operated the Star Flour Mill at Adelong Crossing for many years.

James Moon then spent a long period working for D. McGillivray at the Gilmore mill and afterwards for James Simmers. He later joined his father at the Star Flour Mill and continued that enterprise after Henry Moon’s death, until its building and machinery were destroyed by fire. James subsequently managed the Tumut Steam Flour Mill until the property changed hands.

The obituary does not date these movements or identify the purchaser of the Tumut mill. Even so, it reveals an important part of the industry that cannot be reconstructed from buildings alone. Milling depended on skilled workers who understood grain quality, millstones, rollers, water supply and steam machinery. Those workers moved between establishments, carrying their knowledge through the wider Tumut and Adelong district.

G. F. Grill and the railway-side mill

The railway opened to Tumut on 3 December 1903, changing the commercial geography of the town. French’s history states that G. F. Grill, a Tumut storekeeper, purchased the older mill in 1903 and erected a modern mill near the railway, at the meeting of the Gundagai and Adelong roads.

Railway evidence complicates that sequence. A later lineside-industry survey reports that Grill’s Flour Mill was absent from the 1903 railway-yard layout but appeared on diagrams by 1920. This does not necessarily disprove Grill’s acquisition of an existing milling interest in 1903. It does mean that the construction date of the railway-side mill should not be assumed to be the same as the purchase date.

The move towards the railway was commercially logical. Grain could be delivered in railway wagons and bagged flour dispatched through a siding, reducing the cost and repeated handling involved in serving an isolated creek-side mill. The railway survey identifies a siding for Grill’s Mill and associates it with wagon types suitable for bringing in grain and carrying flour away. By then, milling had moved from dependence on a creek and country road into Tumut’s rail-based industrial precinct.

The old mill as a landmark

The earlier mill building survived after milling activity shifted towards the railway. Local history identifies it near the corner of Capper Street and Adelong Road, where it remained unused but familiar to generations of residents. A photograph preserved by Lost Tumut records the old structure and associates its site with the later Tumut Valley tyre Service property.

French states that the building was demolished in 1964 to make way for a modern service station. That year has not yet been independently confirmed through council files or a contemporary newspaper report, so no more exact demolition date should be supplied.

The change was symbolic as well as physical. A nineteenth-century building associated with wheat, drays and local milling gave way to a business serving twentieth-century motor traffic. The needs of the same road junction had changed, and the old mill had become a landmark rather than a working part of Tumut’s economy.

Why Tumut’s flour mills matter

Together, the mills record the changing foundations of Tumut’s economy: local wheat growing, water power on Gilmore Creek, steam machinery at Mill Angle and the later influence of the railway. They also preserve the histories of owners, lessees and skilled millers, including Francis Foord, Mr Moore or Moon, Fred Body, Ah Chee, James Simmers, Henry and James Moon, the Hayes brothers, D. McGillivray, Allsop & Co and G. F. Grill.

The remaining uncertainty is part of the story. Rate books, land titles, probate records, railway siding agreements and contemporary advertisements may eventually separate establishments that later recollection combined. On present evidence, Tumut’s milling history is best understood as a succession of related enterprises rather than a single mill with an unbroken ownership line.