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Early miller Joseph Mantonya is memorialized by not only a tombstone, but an actual millwheel.
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The millwheel has a brass plate at the bottom which is etched with a dedication and a drawing of an arrowhead.
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A number of trees along the lane to the cemetery and in the cemetery itself are covered with a massive number of burls, suggesting that it has been a long-continuing problem for some of the trees here.
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A grassy, tree-lined lane leads back to the Hall Cemetery, right on the Knox/Licking county line off Larimore Road in Milford Township.
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Today called Otter Creek, this body of water was known as Auter Creek when Joseph Mantonya built a mill near here in 1820. Before that, the body was known as Ramp Creek because of the number of wild leeks which grew here. Early settlers complained that if they let their cows eat the ramps here, the only way they could stand the milk and butter was to eat onions and garlic before using it.
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The millstone is actually made in the French style popular around 1820 (but not so much in 1802, the date the square plaque on the wheel gives), with multiple small buhr stones that are banded together. This allowed for one stone at a time to be replaced instead of replacing an entire millwheel if one section was bad. Is this the actual stone from Mantonya’s mill?
Newspack Team More by adminnewspack