AMERICAN FORK -- Daniel Copper wants to preserve this town's history by converting a flour mill into a hotel and restaurant and retaining a village of historic buildings at the mill property.
Nearly six years ago Copper, an architect from Boston, bought the old Star Flour Mill as the first piece of the puzzle. Built in 1888 and rebuilt in 1907 when it burned down, the rollers stopped rolling 20 years ago, and flour still sits in the machinery."We'll bake a cake with it on Sept. 21 and have a little celebration," Copper said. It will be a 20-year observance of the flour mill shutting down for the last time.
The mill property, now an antique and general store and collection of ancient buildings and dreams, holds many memories for American Fork old-timers. And it still has the smell of fine flour. Copper wants to preserve all that when he converts the mill into a hotel and restaurant. It has, perhaps, the best and most complete set of old flour making machinery around.
"You can count on your fingers of both hands the number of 19th century flour mills with original equipment still intact in the United States," he said, quoting an antique equipment expert from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
"This is the only one in the West he was aware of," Copper said.
His dream came to an abrupt halt and almost died forever on Dec. 13, 1993. Copper and an assistant were removing grain hoppers in the feed mill when Copper fell 45 feet and struck his head. No one saw him fall, he said. But for the next year and a half, work halted.
He used that time to recuperate and learn more about American Fork history. "Everything happens for a reason. I got to know the spirit of the mill," he said.
While city officials have approved an initial master plan, the addition of the hotel and other changes have not yet been submitted, Copper said. He plans on doing that soon. The project lies within an historic overlay zone.
Most of the equipment will stay when the mill is converted. The main floor is destined as the hotel lobby-museum, complete with rollers, floor scale and a hand-powered elevator from the basement to the fourth floor that still works. While people won't be able to use it, the elevator and some of the other old equipment will be demonstrated for visitors, Copper said. He plans to install a modern elevator in what is now the mechanical room.
Designing hotel rooms around the equipment will become a challenge, Copper admits. The rooms are planned for the upper floors and other structures. Hotel rooms in the mill will have some flour-making equipment in them, although some will have to be relocated.
Square wood mill chutes that once moved raw material and flour from machine to machine will hold power and telephone lines and fill other utility needs.
A single large wood silo and three smaller silos adjacent to the mill are also destined as hotel rooms with retail space on the main floor. Copper's collection of old buildings -- log cabins, a barn, the old DaMico shoe store, the historic miller's house and the remains of an old house -- will be used in creating the historic village.
An avid history buff, Copper wants to pave a genealogy of mill ownership into the front sidewalk. Already he has bricks engraved with each owner's name. People who want to donate and help pave the way for the project may purchase a brick with their name on it. Those bricks will go in a sidewalk in front of the rest of the structure.
Flour mills of the last century and well into the 1900s were water powered. Huge leather belts drove the machinery. Star Mill is no exception. Originally built by James Chipman, a son of American Fork co-founder Stephen Chipman, it sits at the bottom of a steep hill just east of 100 East on 600 North.
A now-filled-in pond sat above the mill with a large water pipe sending irrigation water from the mill pond down the steep incline and through the mill's turbine, which powered the equipment. The mill ran 24 hours a day in its heyday, Copper said.
Water flowed through and returned to a creek east of the mill, which locals call Cemetery Ditch. Copper has acquired the property on the south side of the 600 East including part of Old Mill Lane and wants to reconstruct a smaller working grist mill there so visitors can see how wheat was ground historically. He plans to model it after a flour mill that once operated in Pleasant Grove but no longer exists, complete with water wheel.
August Parduhn swapped his Pleasant Grove mill for the larger Star Flour Mill with Sanford Walker and William Preston in 1931. The Parduhn family continued to operate Star Flour until it closed in 1979.
Progress on the convention center is slow. Copper is doing what he can when he can with only family money. It could be a lifetime project, he says. The only interest potential investors have shown is to tear it all down and start again.
"I'm not interested in tearing down and building new," he said, explaining that he wants to preserve history, not re-create it. He wants to breathe new life into what was once a part of early American Fork.