The new year of 1866 began very badly for a Farmington mill owner and the fledgling community that depended upon him. In the early days of January, an overheated funnel caused Joseph Fairbanks’ grist mill to catch on fire. Firefighters on the Eagle Engine rushed from Farmington to Fairbanks Village but arrived too late. Before the fire could be contained, all of the grist mill buildings had been destroyed, as well as Horatio Eaton’s adjoining saw mill. Luckily for Eaton, firefighters were able to save much of the lumber and wooden wheels stacked around his mill.

Eaton sustained a loss of $1,000 for his saw mill, Fairbanks a $2,000 loss for his grist mill. Because area residents relied on the grist mill to grind their grain into meal, the fire threatened the subsistence community.

When spring came, Fairbanks struggled to rebuild. A neighbor let him cut cedar from his land to construct a frame and a flume to direct the water. By the following July 4, Fairbanks had enough equipment up and running to grind small amounts of corn.

“I am again hearing the sound of the mill,” Fairbanks commented at the time, “and it is indeed music to my ears.”

But the 68-year-old miller’s business was struggling.

“I have had a hard tug of it for some three months past,” noted the “Old Miller” in the Farmington Chronicle, “and it may be so for three months to come unless my friends help me a little at the present time.”

In the newspaper, Fairbanks presented community members with an “Old Miller’s Appeal” to his community. “If one hundred persons will lend me five dollars each till the first of January next,” he wrote, “I can go on with the mill and have it completed most probably by next October.”

In exchange for the loan of any amount of money, even a small sum, Fairbanks offered to give the lender a due bill promising to pay the money back in six months, or on demand, with interest. Fairbanks had his house and land up for sale and promised to pay his friends and neighbors back from the proceeds.

This desperate appeal was necessary in a community that did not yet support a formal bank.

Fairbanks was a well-respected local resident. He had been a Farmington selectmen and captain of the North Company infantry in earlier years, and an active member of the temperance movement, which sought to make alcohol illegal.

His reputation with the townspeople who he now solicited was a solid one.

Fairbanks lived another five years after sustaining the loss of his mill to fire. He apparently managed to continue rebuilding and must have made good on any loans extended him by community members. After he died, the writer of a biographical sketch noted that he “well deserved the nickname of “honest miller.”

Luann Yetter has researched and written a history column for the Sun Journal for the past 10 years. She teaches writing at the University of Maine at Farmington and can be reached at [email protected].