The old gristmill ranks with the rural church and country school as one of the principal institutions of the Wisconsin frontier. At one time there were some 10,000 mills in Wisconsin. Most of the little flour and feed mills that once dotted the Wisconsin countryside have vanished.

One Wisconsin writer notes that going to the mill was a day-long outing for the farmer and his family. While the men engaged in talk in the mill and perhaps a nip of the miller’s hard cider, the women engaged in women talk on the banks of the millpond. It was picnic time and a place for “sparking” and “wooing.” In the dog days of August, there was skinny-dipping in the swimming hole; when January’s chill winds blew, crude homemade sleds and skates glided over the ice.

Well hidden from the road, the Messer / Mayer Mill stood in a bramble of trees with only just a trickle of water running at its side. There was not even a trace of the old millpond. The old dam still stood but in considerable ruin.

Inside the building in cobwebs and dust, much of the old equipment remained - the old millstones used to grind wheat and rye until the 1890s and the subsequent old roller milling machines marked with the E. P. Allis Co. of Milwaukee stamp, a leading nineteenth century manufacturer of milling equipment. The elevators used to lift the grain to the top floor of the mill were still in place as were a number of sifters.