Hello again! I hope this finds you well. Less than two weeks in and I already feel like a part of the Archive thanks to how welcoming the team are. It was also great to meet many of the Friends of the Archive at the Garden Party on Saturday, which was a brilliant day – I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, if you were able to come.
On my second Wednesday I finished the first of many waves of my project: creating a folder in our catalogue for each mill we have records for, something you should now be able to access under the ‘Rex Wailes Finland’ tab (by clicking here). Feel free to have a browse, and you will be able to see that the folders are gradually being linked to other interesting and similar items. Later on there will be images of many of the entries to complete the puzzle, and you can track my progress for yourself as I uncover more and more of Rex’s wonderful collection – recording both his and others’ travels around the beautiful country that is Finland.
You can see the passion Rex had for mills throughout his collection; their location, appearance, measurements, types, functions, mechanics, uses and dates have all been meticulously preserved. There are hundreds of photographs and pages of notes to accompany any mill you wish to learn about – and none of it seems to have proved a hardship. A true academic!
Many of the images of the mills – including some very unusual ones – are taken at a fairly uniform distance or angle, yet occasionally there are irregularities. The photographs where you can really see how impressive and domineering these power sources are are great to come across. Only then can you really get a sense of their majesty over their surroundings. Wailes talks at great length, for example, about the only complete mill that he saw in South Bothnia (a province towards the south west of Finland): at Törnavä, Seinäjoki.
The mill was built in 1886 at Ilmajoki, but was moved several times before being sold to the local Museum Society. The paper then continues to describe the mill’s precise structure and dimensions, with measurements recorded to the inch. Some of the information provided is within the photographic collection itself, and other characteristics of the mills are added separately for you to piece together. Some of our main sources are the Transactions of the Newcomen Society volumes. As I’m sure you’re aware, you can view fascinating papers like these (and so much more) for yourself at the Archive by getting in touch with us here.
Just one of the other things you can glean from the Newcomen articles is just what was thought of the condition of some of the mills upon visiting. By using only one person’s collection, it is possible to construct an image of the way they conducted enquiries and later wrote about their discoveries. Upon entering one hollow post (magpie) mill it was noted “the ground floor [of Orivesi Museum Mill in Häme] is full of museum junk”. This shows us that Rex was far more interested in the mills being used for milling than to serve as a relic or just be judged on seemingly superficial aesthetics by tourists.
In another amusing case, it has been recorded on the reverse of a technical drawing of a magpie mill that the number of sails shown is in fact misleading (to the point of being plainly wrong). “Fake sails!” the handwriting exclaims: there should be six, eight, or even ten rather than the four illustrated.
Finds such as these are always fun to uncover, and I hope you will enjoy reading about even more in my subsequent blog posts. Now, back to the cataloguing!