The mill complex in Hobart, circa 1947, after the Lake County Farm Bureau Co-op bought it from

the partnership of Roper & Brown. (1) This building used to be the horse barn. (2) This building held storage bins for grain. You dumped the grain into a basement receptacle through hole in the floor; a grain elevator, consisting of a belt with metal buckets, carried the grain from that receptacle up into the storage bins. You could actually drive a truck in there to deposit grain. To get it from there to the mill, workers would hand-bag the grain and hand-truck it over to the mill. (3) This building held finished (ground) livestock feed. Before the construction of (6), feed sales were transacted here. Trucks would back up to this building to be loaded. (4) The old mill building. (5) The scale house, used to weigh coal. You drove the whole truck in there to be weighed. First you weighed it empty, then filled it with coal and weighed it again to figure out how much coal you had. (When this scale house ceased to be used, the scale was sold to Don Piske on Lake Eliza Road.) (6) The Farm Bureau Co-op built this feed store after buying the mill operation from Roper & Brown. The Roper & Brown partnership owned three mills, in Hobart, Wheeler and McCool. By the 1940s, the mill was on electric (not water) power, so it did not need the river anymore, but there was no point in moving it. Originally the Hobart mill mechanism was

the type known as a burr mill. After an accident where a belt pulley broke, the owners replaced the burr mill with a hammer mill. You had to get your cattle feed freshly ground each week, because the cows liked it fresh. You filled up bags of dried corn on the cob from your corn crib along with the wheat you had threshed, loaded up the wagon and drove to the Hobart mill. There the guy running the mill took your bags, emptied them out and shoveled the contents into the mill (the corn had to go through a crusher first, but the entire thing, including the cob, was used). You took your empty bags to the other end of the mill and filled them up again as the freshly ground corn-and-wheat feed came out. The Roper & Brown partnership consisted of Owen Roper and Milton Brown. Owen Roper was quite a character; he wasn't afraid to tell you exactly what he wanted, in a loud voice and a manner that could be described as blunt. Once when there was to be a school holiday to allow the teachers to attend a conference, Mr. Roper showed up at the farmhouse of a family south of town and asked what one of the boys intended to do the next week when school was out. The boy said he didn't know, to which Mr. Roper responded: "You're working for me!" and hired him on the spot to work the three days. That was typical of Mr. Roper.