Bowens Mills: a buckwheat mill that ran for generations

The smell that made Bowens Mills famous was buckwheat. Edwin Bowen came up from Ohio, bought the local sawmill in 1864, and with his son William added a three-story grist mill beside it — two sets of French burr stones turning in a frame building barely two dozen feet wide. People drove wagons in from across Barry County for the buckwheat flour that came out of it, and the Bowens kept the stones turning until 1912. The mill itself, in one form or another, ran into the 1950s, well past a century of service to a community that never topped 100 people.

That tiny community is why the place exists at all. Settlement began here in the Yankee Springs country in the mid-1830s, and by 1850 there was a post office called Gun Lake. Around 1870 the town quietly renamed itself for its leading citizen, and “Bowens Mills” it has been since — a sawmill, a general store, a blacksmith, and not much else, tucked into the woods between Gun Lake and the Thornapple country.

Today it’s a 19-acre Michigan state historic site, a second-generation family operation that keeps the old machinery and the trades it depended on alive. The covered bridge people stop to photograph is the romantic part and the honest part at once: it isn’t an antique. It was built in 1982, a deliberate scale replica of a covered bridge that once crossed the Thornapple River up in Middleville, designed by a miller named Neal H. Cook.

So the mill is the real 1860s artifact and the bridge is a loving copy of something Barry County lost — which is a fair description of how a lot of small-town history actually survives.