After having lived within a few hundred yards of the Grovers Mill building for nearly 60 years, I feel a certain personal attachment to the place. If you don’t know where that building is, it’s at the intersection of Cranbury and Clarksville Roads, just about one mile from Princeton Junction.
If you go there now, you will see unmistakable signs of construction going on. So what is all this? Are they tearing it down? Rebuilding or replacing it? What’s happening looks pretty serious.
To find out what’s going on, I stopped by and met the guy in charge of the project. He is Carl VanDyke, who owns the place. He bought both the mill building and the old barn across the street several years ago. The barn was refurbished and put to use with a couple of apartments and rental space for professional offices. Now it’s the mill’s turn. He plans to outfit the old mill with five rental apartments. It won’t be the first time the mill has been used as a place to live, but the magnitude of the job is larger than ever before. And it gets right down to replacing some of what was original construction, including timbers bigger than any that have been used in building construction for well over a century.
When we moved to Grovers Mill in 1957, we had been living in Princeton for five years. An important factor in our choice was the fact that it was close to my office in Princeton Junction, just a mile away. My main familiarity with the location was that it was the place the Martians had landed during Orson Welles’ famous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. An artifact of that occasion remains today in the form of a wind mill/water tower that was shot at by a nearby farmer with his shotgun. The water tower is about 50 yards from the mill. The farmer mistook the tower for a Martian.
In 1957, the mill was owned by Bill Denison, who ran a retail store on the first floor. He sold fertilizer, grass seed and garden hand tools. He also sold what were the latest thing in the 1950’s—gasoline powered lawn mowers. I got my first one from him. He used the barn across the road for stock storage and a small mower repair shop. We soon learned that the mill had been used for grinding grain up until the start of World War II, when most of the able-bodied men who were needed for the labor-intensive work got drafted into the military service. The mill did not resume commercial activity until after the war.
After Denison, the mill was owned by the Schwartz’s who lived there on the second floor and operated an art gallery and studio on the first. Some of the exhibitions, which included paintings and sculpture, were remarkable in that they included many items that were derived from parts of the mill structure and its machinery that was no longer in use.
Since a mill like this one depended on water power to do its job of grinding grain, there had to be an efficient way to utilize the water as it flowed past the mill in what was called the mill race. In the case of Grovers Mill the mill race was on the side away from Cranbury Road where the driving mechanism was set up.
The main parts of this were the vertical and horizontal shafts that carried the large steel pulleys connected by broad belts made of leather. Some of the parts for the driving mechanism are now on view in the form of “Sculpture of Opportunity” at the entrance to a nearby property on Clarksville Road. After the art gallery era, the mill became the site of Mark Schulman’s chiropractic office, which was in operation until just a few years ago. It was from Dr. Schulman’s estate that the present owner obtained the property.
The new owner, Carl Van Dyke, plans to use the interior space at the mill to build five residential apartments. If one goes to the mill now and inspects what has been revealed of the structure in recent weeks, it is amazing to see what has served as the main structure of the building for so many years.
Local historians estimate that the original mill was built in the late 18th Century. Some of the structural beams revealed by the current work are made of oak and measure 10-by-15 inches in section and are up to 25 feet long. Before electric saws were available, beams like this were cut with hand saws and an adze.
In order to construct the new apartment spaces in a way that will be consistent with present-day water plumbing and ventilating system requirements, much work has to be done on the existing structure, especially where pipes and ducts must be installed. This is a particularly complex problem in a building that was first built long before there was any such thing as an indoor plumbing system.
With the completion of the rehabilitation of Grovers Mill Pond in 2009, the first step in the complete “make-over” of the Grovers Mill area was taken. The completion of the current improvements should put the finishing touches on anything else that would be needed for the Grovers Mill building itself to become part of the community once again.
