The Chesapeake Mill
Wickham, Hampshire County, England
The River Meon has been a driving force of history since before Roman times. It starts as a spring in the South Downs of southern England, enters the top of Wickham Parish, County of Hampshire at 90 feet above sea level, and accelerates down to 25 feet above sea level as it leaves the parish and heads for the Solent near Hill Head. The first wooden bridge across the Meon was probably built south of Wickham by the Romans as part of the transportation routes between Winchester and Chichester. The town of Wickham dates officially to a 1269 charter by King Henry III, and the mill in Wickham is first recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, valued at twenty-two shillings. The watermills of England usually milled grain drawn from the farms of their market areas, and took a percentage of the product as payment. In 1820 the old mill at Bridge Street in Wickham was torn down and a new, modern mill was built in its place. It’s wood was purchased from the breaking up of the USS Chesapeake, and was used without alteration or cutting so that the mill took on the size and form of the original U.S. Navy frigate.
This 1930s
photograph, most
known to naval
historians,
captures the
merger of the
function of a grain
mill within the
structure of an old
sailing frigate.
Mariners' Museum
The treads of this stairway
between floors are worn
down with use on both
sides, suggesting that
they may date to the
USS Chesapeake when
worn ship stairways were
recycled by turning them
upside down.
Jeffrey Macechak.
The last of the millstones
used in Chesapeake Mill,
probably quarried in
France.
Hampshire Mills Group
In 1997, as the Chesapeake Mill sat idle on the River Meon, its future was anyone’s guess. Some had designs on the mill as a commercial place, perhaps a boutique restaurant or a condominium conversion. Those who appreciated the mill’s history wanted to save it as the historic building that it was.
The decision was made by the County of Hampshire that if a well-funded and long-term plan to save the mill as a museum could not be found it could not afford to support it in that way on its own. The county leased it to a company that would continue its use as the commercial building it had been since 1820, and invest in its repair and maintenance without altering its historic timbers and structure. Preservationists were not totally pleased with the result, but most agreed that it was an acceptable outcome.
Go to Deadman's Island, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Go to War of 1812