Farmers Roost provided a place to stay for farmers

By Tom Hintgen

Otter Tail County Correspondent

Stories of delivering wheat to Phelps Mill, for milling into flour, have been passed along from one farm family generation to the next. Located in Maine Township of central Otter Tail County, the mill was in business from 1889 to 1939.

“I recall my mother talking about her dad hauling wheat to the mill via horse-drawn wagon,” said Phyllis Nelson Rossow of rural Rothsay. “He would be gone two days driving from rural Erhard, waiting for the wheat to be ground into flour, and then traveling back home again.”

Continues Rossow: “Mom was born in 1916, and my grandfather died when she was 11, so this would have been in the 1920s for her to have this memory.”

Phelps Mill was designed to produce 60 to 75 barrels of flour per day. At the height of the wheat grinding season, 25 to 35 wagons loaded with stacks of wheat would line up outside the mill. Nearby was a restaurant, general store and blacksmith shop.

Also delivering wheat to Phelps Mill was Michael Lange who farmed in Star Lake Township. He was the grandfather of this writer’s wife, Sharon, and father of Tom Hintgen’s late mother-in-law Delores Lange Voigt.

Michael and his wife, Helen, were Germans who immigrated to the United States from Prussia in 1888. In 1910 they moved to Star Lake Township from southern Minnesota. Their daughter, Delores, heard many stories about her father hauling wheat with a team or horses to Phelps Mill. 

The mill was very successful until 1900, but after that year business gradually declined. By the 1930s the railway was in place and farmers began to ship their grain to Minneapolis. Phelps Mill closed in 1939, during the Great Depression.

In 1965 Otter Tail County purchased Phelps Mill and surrounding land as a recreational site. The mill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Major repairs of Phelps Mill, including foundation stabilization, were completed in recent months.

The nearby Phelps Mill Store, used in previous years by visitors who purchased ice cream, pop, memorabilia and other items, will be repaired. Plans are in place to receive state grants.

“I remember eating ice cream at the store,” Rossow said. “I look forward to seeing the store repaired and usable again.”

“Farmers Roost”

at Phelps Mill

Mill owner William Thomas, responding to the necessity of many farmers staying overnight following their deliveries of wheat, constructed a lodging facility. The “Farmer’s Roost” was located on the river flats north of Phelps Mill.

A horse barn was built in 1890 and had room for 16 teams of horses. Stabling was free. In the winter, area farmers came to the mill by bobsled, pulled by horses and described in the book, “Phelps Mill, a Community for its Time,” written by Ro Giencke.

“Farmers went home with enough flour to last many months,” wrote Giencke. “Flour was used by farm wives making multiple loaves of bread to feed big families. Flour was truly the staff of life.”

Phelps flour was delivered by wagon to communities in Otter Tail County. The mill driver handled a team of mules. Flour was delivered by sleigh in the winter.

“Today, the sound of water rushing over the dam and sweeping past the structure is the same sound workers and farmers at Phelps Mill heard many years ago,” says Chris Schuelke, executive director of the Otter Tail County Historical Society.

Customers from a four-mile area traded at the Phelps Mill store. Shelves held canned baked beans and tins of corned beef and sardines. Sales items also included bedding and other necessities of rural living. A gasoline pump stood near the north outside wall of the store.

Hundreds of people visit Phelps Mill each year, including artists and photographers from near and far, with the Phelps Mill Festival a big attraction each summer.