Historic Watermills of the South : Enduring Legacy and Timeless Charm

Today, few Southerners are aware of the economic, social, technological, and historical significance of the thousands of watermills that once stood along streams across the Southern landscape in the thousands.

Today, few Southerners are aware of the economic, social, technological, and historical significance of the thousands of watermills that once stood along streams across the Southern landscape in the thousands. Beginning in the early twentieth century, however, the transition to newer technologies was rapid, making the visual preservation and written record of Southern watermills vital to our understanding of regional history. Driven by Ken Boyd’s remarkable photography from the past five decades, Historic Watermills of the South provides a rare glimpse into the history, evolution, and significance of Southern watermills to grind grain, saw lumber, power textile machines, and perform other useful work. Boyd uses more than two hundred fine-art color, black & white, and hand-tinted photographs to present an illustrated history of more than eighty watermills scattered across more than a dozen Southern states. These photographs vividly recount a way of life that has now passed. Indeed, a number of the images in Historic Watermills of the South photographically preserve watermills that no longer exist. And for others, these are the best-existing images of mills located in remote, rural, isolated, and often mountainous, marshy, or otherwise difficult locations. Boyd’s Historic Watermills of the South is a true visual preservation of a technology that changed the face of a region.