The Bale Grist Mill
Near St. Helena, California
A few miles north, a great wooden waterwheel still turns beside the highway at the Bale Grist Mill. It was built in eighteen forty six by Doctor Edward Turner Bale, an English surgeon who had sailed to California in the eighteen thirties and served as a surgeon for General Mariano Vallejo. Bale married Vallejo's niece, Maria Soberanes, and soon received a sprawling land grant in the upper Napa Valley called Rancho Carne Humana.
The mill he built there ground the settlers' wheat and corn into flour and meal, and it quickly became a social hub, a place where neighbors gathered while they waited for their grain. Bale did not enjoy it long. He died in eighteen forty nine, the year the Gold Rush transformed California, and his widow Maria took over the mill and the ranch.
Through shrewd management she became one of the wealthiest people in the valley, and later sold land near the future town of Saint Helena. The mill is one of only two water powered mills still standing west of the Mississippi River. On weekends the wheel turns again and volunteers grind grain the old way, just as they did before there was a wine industry here at all.
