Butte Creek Mill

The loading dock on North Royal Avenue

A broad overhang shades the front loading dock of Butte Creek Mill, two blocks off Oregon Highway 62 on the way to Crater Lake. The dock holds tables and chairs and an old wooden bench. Through the open doors come the clacking and humming of pulleys and belts working the machinery, and the smell of newly crushed grain drifts out to the street. Below, in the lower level, water from Little Butte Creek arrives through a millrace nearly half a mile long and turns the turbine. The grinding is still done on the French buhr stones that came to Eagle Point in 1872. The Butte Creek Mill Foundation, which owns and runs the place, calls it the only water-powered grist mill on this side of the Mississippi River.

The dock leads into the Country Store, where antique memorabilia stands behind the shelves. The store sells the mill’s pancake and waffle mix, bran muffin mix and cornbread mix, along with stone-ground hard red wheat, hard white wheat and pastry flour. It also stocks bulk spices, loose teas, kitchen and baking goods, made-in-Oregon items and cold drinks. A counter serves soft serve in cones and cups, including a pineapple dole whip. On sample Saturdays the store hands out what it has just baked. Posts from September 2026 list oatmeal cookies, banana bread and a new Bigfoot cookie mix, with Oregon Mountain Coffee by the bag. In September 2026 the Foundation reported its new kitchen nearly finished, and the first bran muffins baked in it went out as free samples. The kitchen is certified for food classes and was one of the expansions the Foundation announced for 2026, along with a new deck.

Behind the store is a Great Room, rebuilt using the original timber framing and vaulted ceilings and rented for weddings, reunions and banquets of up to about 100 people. Beside the mill stand the former Ice House and a garden named for Debbie Russell, a former owner who died of cancer three months before the fire. The garden can be rented by the community.

Bingo, barbecue and a Camaro full of toys

The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, and its events pay part of the mill’s way. October 2026 opens with the last of the season’s second-Saturday farmers markets on October 10. The markets run monthly from April and carry baked goods, jams, plants and vegetables from Jackson, Josephine and Siskiyou counties, and the mill’s chili is promised for the final one. Bingo is played inside the mill on Wednesday evenings from October 14 through November 18, with $5 cards and food for sale. A Sourdough 101 class meets October 17. A pig barbecue and dinner on October 24 runs from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. for $15. On October 31, Halloween at the Mill brings candy, costumes, trick-or-treating among local businesses’ tables, and a pumpkin carving contest, with some of the pumpkins supplied by Harry & David and the Grange Co-op. A makers market follows on November 7 and 8, and a holiday market and bazaar on November 21 and 22. The Magic of Christmas at the Mill runs from December 4, 2026, through January 1, 2027.

The Christmas season starts in September. On September 27, 2026, classic cars came to the mill packed with toys for the annual toy drive, and the day opened with coffee, cookies and free chili. Donna Fagan-Pelissier, president of the Foundation, told KOBI-TV that afternoon: “So we did two trophies, we did a fan favorite, and then we did the most toys. 95 toys in one camaro definitely was the winner, so I don’t know, I think we had 50 or 60 cars.” The mill’s own post that evening gave the most-toys trophy to the Rogue Eagle Motoring Group with 94 toys and put the day’s total at about 140. KOBI’s headline said over 150. The toys are stored until December, when Santa hands them to children at the mill. “What I really love about it,” Fagan-Pelissier said, “is that they sit outside and go ‘it just feels good being here.’”

French stones and a half-mile race

The stones came first in the planning and last in the building. Eber Emery, born in 1819, reached Oregon by pack train in 1850 and as a millwright had built Ashland’s first flour mill and sawmill. In February 1872 he and John Daley bought a mill site on Little Butte Creek. In March they bought a right of way from a landowner, John Mathews, to cut the millrace. Adronirum John Daley picked a spot on a fairly steep bank on the west side of the creek, and an old irrigation ditch there was dug deeper by horse and hand labor. His father, John W. Daley, Sr., and Emery began building in July 1872. On September 7, 1872, the Democratic Times reported John Daley at work on a new gristmill.

The lumber came from a pine stand at Butte Falls. The frame was hand-hewn posts and beams 12 to 14 inches square, joined by mortise and tenon and held with oak pegs, set on a 20-inch mortared stone wall along the street side. The finished mill stood four stories, counting a daylight basement.

The accounts of the stones’ route differ. The marker erected in 2006 by the Umpqua Joe and Humbug chapters of E Clampus Vitus says they were quarried in France near Paris and assembled into four-foot stones in Moline, Illinois. From there, it says, they were shipped around the Horn to Crescent City, California, and carried over the mountains by wagon. The Foundation’s history says the stones, about 1,400 pounds each, traveled by ship down the Mississippi, around Chile to the California coast, and then by ox cart to Eagle Point. The 1976 National Register nomination repeats a story it calls never substantiated: Daley supposedly sent his two sons by wagon to fetch the stones from Crescent City, and one was killed in an Indian attack on the way back.

The Foundation dates the first flour to August 30, 1873, under the name Daley and Emery Butte Creek Mills, and says output reached 40 barrels a day within weeks. A notice dated September 1, 1873, announced the partners ready to store wheat and set grinding for the 10th of the month, at a toll of an eighth of a bushel or by exchange. The road out front, by the marker’s account, was the old military road to Fort Klamath. Farmers’ wagons lined it for miles at harvest, and Klamath Indians walked 90 miles from the fort to trade berries and leather goods for flour.

Snowy Butte, rollers and the Putmans

In 1878 Emery and Daley dissolved the partnership. Daley’s son A.J. and grandson George took over and called the business the Snowy Butte Mill. When a rival group of investors tried to start a flour mill down the road, the Snowy Butte Mill replaced its stones with roller machinery and the rivals gave up. The Foundation dates the change to 1889, the nomination to the latter part of the 1880s. The stones went into storage.

The sales that followed are told two ways. The Foundation says the Daleys sold in 1892 to Jacksonville residents, who ran it as the Snowy Butte Roller Flouring Mill Company, and that William Holmes, two of his brothers and Harry Carlton took over in 1896. The nomination has A.J. Daley as miller until 1893, when he sold to the Holmes Brothers of Eagle Point. The flour took a First Premium at the Oregon Industrial Exposition in 1898. A photograph from 1899 shows George Bearl Daley with bags of Snowy Butte Flour. In 1912 an addition on the south side gave storage and a loading dock. Its siding was cut with a circular saw where the original had been whip-sawn, and its basement joints were nailed rather than pegged.

FS and GW Brandon bought the mill in 1916 and added equipment to steam and roll barley and oats. In 1918, according to the Medford Mail, the mill ran at full capacity on a government contract for 70,000 barrels of flour for the war. The Foundation says it closed in 1919 and passed to the Eagle Point Bank. The nomination says the Brandons went out of business in 1920 and Henry Campbell, an Eagle Point banker, acquired it. Either way it stood idle until 1932, when George Putman bought the mill and water rights from Campbell’s widow. The Foundation names her as president of the bank. Putman and his sons Ed and Frank ran it as Putman Bros. Feed and Seed. In the 1930s a north addition housed frozen-food lockers and a meat cutting room, where customers brought slaughtered animals to be cut and wrapped.

In 1950, the year the Medford Mail Tribune reported “Old Burrstones Again to Turn at Eagle Point Mill,” George Putman pulled out the rollers and put the old stones back to work. The store sold flour alongside farm tools, horse medicine, veterinary supplies and feed. George and Ed died within months of each other in 1962, and Frank carried on, selling flour to bakeries in the Willamette Valley.

Frank sold to Peter and Cora Crandall in 1972, by the Foundation’s date, or 1973, by the nomination’s. Peter was a mechanical engineer who developed the stone-ground recipes, and Cora managed the business and baked. They turned the feed and animal supply area into the Country Store, renamed the place Butte Creek Mill, and gave tours. The mill went on the National Register of Historic Places on September 1, 1976. At that time it was the only one of Oregon’s two water-powered mills grinding flour; Thompson’s Mill in Shedd ground only animal feed. When Crandall retired he sought a buyer who would keep it running. In 2005 Bob and Debbie Russell bought it and kept a sign on the counter: “Enter as Strangers, Leave as Friends.”

Christmas morning, 2015

The fire began at about 3:00 a.m. on December 25, 2015, and was later ruled an accidental electrical malfunction. No one was hurt. About 70 percent of the 143-year-old building was lost, along with an estimated $1,000,000 in antiques. Its Lloyds of London policy, the only one the owners could find, covered $400,000. The basement survived, and so did the two millstones and the adjoining antique store. That surviving 30 percent kept the mill on the National Register. Russell, by then Eagle Point’s mayor, had lost his wife three months earlier. He moved the property into a foundation formed to rebuild. The Foundation dates its charity status to 2016; a January 2018 statement from the mill puts it in early 2017. That same statement reported $400,000 raised in cash and $500,000 in kind, and said the Timber Framers Guild had taken the rebuilding as its 2018 community project.

Every new piece of lumber was cut to the dimensions of the 19th-century original. Millwrights from Washington State restored the machinery and grinding by 2020, by the Foundation’s account. In 2022 Trout Unlimited bought the mill’s senior water right from Russell. Between 6.62 and 8.4 cubic feet per second now stay in Little Butte Creek permanently for fish and wildlife. The remaining 16 cubic feet per second still power the mill and stay in the stream when the mill is idle. The Foundation says the right is non-consumptive: the water passes through the lower level and goes back to the creek, which runs Coho, Chinook and steelhead.

On an October 22, crowds estimated in the thousands came for the reopening of the lobby and Country Store, marking the mill’s sesquicentennial and its return after seven years. Volunteers under Therese Hoehne mixed and bagged the mill’s flour into the old baking and pancake mixes. By KOBI’s count, the rebuilding took more than $2.5 million in community donations. On Christmas 2025, ten years after the fire, the mill held a holiday market and a tree lighting, and Santa came. “I felt like the community needed an opportunity to have Christmas back,” Fagan-Pelissier said.