Seven occupations at once

He was thirty and he had money.

Born at Torrington, Connecticut, in July of 1806, one of twelve children, and taken to Ohio at sixteen when his parents moved to Summit County. His father died in August of that year and he ran the home farm until he was twenty-two. He married Margaret Hine of Tallmadge in 1828, farmed at Wadsworth, and for a time made fanning mills and sawed lumber there.

In 1836 he sold everything he had in Ohio.

In March of 1837 he came to the southern line of Johnson Township, put up a log house, and went back for his wife and children. In September he brought them out.

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The first thing he built was a sawmill, and the race that fed it was half a mile long and he dug it himself.

The mill was finished in 1838. A year or two later he put a small set of buhrs in an addition to it. The buhrs had come from O. P. Grannis. While he was running that first gristmill, the county history says, he fed the men who came to him for flour and charged them nothing for it.

By about 1841 the sawing machinery had moved to a new mill twelve or fifteen rods further up the race, and the room it left was fitted out for carding wool.

In about 1839 he opened a store with about a thousand dollars of goods in it. Eight or ten years after beginning, the book says, he probably had seven thousand dollars of goods on hand.

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Then he built the gristmill that was still running when the county history went to press.

That was 1845, with the old buhrs and two new ones in it, and the book calls it one of the best for miles around. He put up a new storeroom in 1847.

And here is what he was doing by then, in the county history's own words.

It is said that at one time Mr. Wolcott was engaged in seven different occupations, milling, sawing, blacksmithing, merchandising, "coopering," farming and manufacturing potash.

Twenty workmen. Fifteen buildings in the village, rented out or sold as people needed them. A carding mill that ran about four years and never made a yard of cloth. And a distillery that ran for a short time, which the book says may have been his or may have been a man named Weston, and possibly both.

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He also built the school.

The Wolcottville Seminary went up at his expense, all of it, and he hired the teachers. In 1851 he wrote to a former governor of Vermont asking him to send one, which is a story this archive has already told.

He paid tuition as well. Under the contract with Miss Griggs his own children were to be taught free, and in one year he paid seventy-five dollars anyway.

The county historian's comment on that is one sentence.

Lack of generosity was not one of his faults.

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There is one other sentence about him, and it does not fit the rest.

It sits at the head of the township chapter's account of him, before the mills and the race and the seven occupations, and it is the county historian introducing the man.

He was a very energetic, hard-working, generous man, but burdened, as many of us are, with a high spirit.

Nothing else in any of these books says anything like it. Ford does not characterise him. The atlas does not. And this is Rerick, writing twenty-five years after Wolcott was dead, in a book his widow and children were alive to read.

Burdened with a high spirit is not a compliment and it is not quite an accusation. It is the kind of thing written about a man whose neighbours remembered something the record does not carry, and this piece cannot tell you what it was.

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The settlement that grew up around the mill took his name.

That is in his sketch in the 1882 volume, and it is the only place in any of these books that says so. The same volume's chapter on the township runs to pages on the mills, the store, the buhrs, the race and the seven occupations, and never once says the town is called Wolcottville because of him.

Ford's history of 1920 calls him the pioneer miller of Wolcottville. The 1893 atlas says he established the milling interests and about all the industries that were available besides.

The one source that says the town carries his name is the one written twenty-five years after he died.

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He sold all of it in about 1851.

McMeans and Weston bought the mills, and perhaps other property with them. After a few years they sold to Wilbur and Hitchcock, who held them until 1860, when Taylor and Wildman bought them. In 1866 they went to other parties again.

He was in his middle forties when he sold, and he lived six more years. He died on the thirty-first of March, 1857, at fifty.

Margaret Wolcott was still in Wolcottville twenty-five years after he died, seventy-eight years old, on seventy-four acres near the village, and the book calls her one of the highly esteemed old settlers of Johnson Township.

They had seven children. The sketch says six and then lists seven: Ann, Abby, Rowena, Almira, Elton, Marshall and Amelia. Two of them were already dead when it was printed.

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The mill outlasted him on paper by longer than he owned it.

When the fire insurance men came to Wolcottville in May of 1895, thirty-eight years after he died and forty-four after he sold, they drew the race, the water gate, the penstock and the wheel, and lettered the building on it.

WOLCOTT MILLS. E. A. CUTLER, PROP.

His name on the first line and another man's underneath it.

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They came back in March of 1901 and lettered it the same way.

That is fifty years after he sold the mills to McMeans and Weston, and forty-four after he was buried. Whether the building drawn there is the gristmill he put up in 1845 is not something any of these books says, and this piece will not say it either. What the sheet records is the name.

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By 1907 it is gone.

The sheet that year letters E. A. CUTLER FLOUR-FEED MILL, and Cutler had been the proprietor all along. In 1914 it is J. KELLER & CO. FLOUR MILL. In 1922, CITY MILLING CO. FEED MILL, and there is a Wolcottville Elevator Company down the street.

The town kept the name. The mill gave it up.