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 ake a virtual walk through the mill or around the surrounding grounds. Come watch a frame being made or just watch and listen to the brook running past the mill.
The Schwamb Mill Preservation Trust preserves the site today as a living industrial museum that has been listed in The National Register of Historic Places since 1971. As a pioneer in industrial preservation, the Trust holds the property in trust for the American people and welcomes the public to the longest continuously operating mill site in the Western Hemisphere. Although only a few woodworkers run the machinery and turn the ovals now, whereas thirty-five workers were here a century ago, the workplace atmosphere and devotion to tradition remains the same.
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OLD SCHWAMB MILL HISTORIC SITE Commemorating the inventive genius and practical ability of New England's millwrights and millers, who have operated grist, saw, spice and
woodworking mills on this site for three centuries. Placed by Massachusetts Society Daughters of the American Colonists
June 1, 1974
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The Old Schwamb Mill as it is seen today represents a very brief period in American history, when the Industrial Revolution was underway but work in wood was still being done by hand, with limited help from machines. At the Mill, the visitor is invited to step into the museum exhibit itself, stepping first onto an ancient granite millstone used in the 17th century by English Puritans here to grind corn into corn meal. Then, into the 19th century office, with Charles Schwamb's rolltop desk, walls hung with oval and circular frames, and linear moulding samples. A small gold leaf framed oil painting of a 19th century European farm and mill suggests the home the six Schwamb brothers left behind in Rhine Hessen, Germany when, over a twenty-year period in the mid-19th Century, they sailed to America. An 1872 framed photograph of the Mill and 35 workers suggests the progress Charles Schwamb had made at this site in only eight years since he purchased this spice mill site in 1864.
Passing into the woodworking shop past the array of oval and circular cardboard frame quadrant patterns, one comes immediately to an enormous wood-framed Yates-American bandsaw, with three faceplate lathes, jig-set table saws, sanding wheel, and a 24"-bed jointer appropriately spaced beyond. All are connected by overhead shafting, leather belts, and pulleys, through which energy is transferred from ceiling-mounted motors that in 1954 replaced steam power, which in turn had replaced water power in 1872. On the walls at the far end of the shop are cubbyholes filled with hundreds of 6" lengths of linear moulding profiles identified with customers' names, and racks of sharp steel cutters once used in the S. A. Woods 4-sided moulding machine, sold by the Schwambs in 1969 before the Mill Trustees could save it. In this sunny, mellow-gold atmosphere of time worn floors and workbenches, with the ever-present crashing noise of the little brook outside the windows, time has stood still.
As an industrial building, the main structure was rebuilt after an 1861 fire, specifically to contain and protect this collection of tools and machinery. The Mill's interior is one of the most significant in the country, not only as a real 19th century workplace but also as a telling record of six German immigrant entrepreneurs who left their family's Rhine Hessen farm and mill to seek their fortune in the New World. They became passionate Americans. Making piano cases, architectural woodwork, or picture frame mouldings, they established three flourishing woodworking enterprises on the Mill Brook, served in public office, and contributed generously to the cultural life of their new home. Charles Schwamb contributed the first music books to the local public school system. His son Carl was the organist at the Follen Unitarian Church in East Lexington (a mile away), and grandson Clinton was the organist at the First Baptist Church in Arlington Center.
The six brothers' descendants have proliferated and prospered, many in positions of outstanding business leadership in major industries throughout the country.
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