It All Began Here
It All Began Here
Since 1857, the Granville Manufacturing Company, now known simply as Granville Mills, has been acclaimed for our unique one piece hardwood bowls utilizing the original modern technology and machinery of the 19th century. The processes developed and improved here maximize the raw material’s utility, beauty, and strength while minimizing and recycling the waste.
The Bowl Mill
The Bowl Mill
Located on a 55-acre site on the main branch of the White River bordering the Green Mt. National Forest, the mill contains the original machinery designed in the mid-1800s, now run by electricity instead of waterpower. In the more than 160 years since its inception, the mill has been owned and operated by only four families. The business was begun by the Hemenway family in Ludlow, where the bowl lathe was designed and patented. The mill then relocated to Warren, remaining there until a fire in 1878, until it was rebuilt at its present home in Granville in 1879.
In 1913, the Rice family bought the mill from the Hemenways, and operated it for almost 60 years, before selling it to the Howlett family in 1972; who then sold it to the Fullers. Current CEO Jeff Fuller quips, “About a year after we bought the business in 1980, my grandmother went to a family reunion and discovered that we were related to the Hemenway family who founded this business in 1857, and also to the Rice family, that ran it for a long time, and we hadn’t known that before!”
Creating Turned Hardwood Bowls
Creating Turned Hardwood Bowls
Granville began operating during a time of ecological transition in Vermont. Almost the entire state was forested when white settlers first penetrated the area in the 1600s. By 1880, nearly 80 percent of Vermont had been cleared for farming. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, land abandoned by farmers migrating west began to revert to hardwood forest. Cherry, poplar, beech, and maple replaced the spruce and pine cleared by the lumber industry and helped foster the post-Civil War growth of the region’s wood products industry by ensuring a local supply of quality hardwoods.
Butter tubs were the original product of the Granville Manufacturing Company when it opened in 1857. Three years later, the founders designed and built two bowl lathes to produce consumer-grade wood bowls. Operations moved twice before settling in 1879 on 55 acres along the main branch of the White River on land that borders what is now part of the Green Mountain National Forest.
Granville’s bowls have been made virtually the same way for nearly 150 years. Logs harvested in Vermont and surrounding states were first cut with a bar saw into sections between 18 and 22 inches long. These sections were then cut vertically using a circular saw, creating one flat side opposite the rounded exterior. This flat side of the wood block was mounted onto the bowl lathe, where it was spun and cut. The first bowl would be the largest, and then smaller and smaller bowls would be cut from the remaining block. A single block produced as many as six bowls, ranging in diameter from approximately 17 inches down to 7 inches. Scraps and the outside shells were sold as firewood, and sawdust was sold to local farmers for animal bedding. The changes in the production process were few but notable.
A devastating flood in 1927 washed away the Granville Dam, which fed water to the mill’s turbine, and forced the mill owners to switch to electricity. Beginning in the 1980s, the drying and stacking of the green bowls was moved inside from the outdoor, open-air sheds. Reaching the desired 12% moisture content for the bowls in the outside sheds took six weeks in the summer and four months in the winter, but in controlled temperature and humidity, the bowls dried in less than two weeks. To create smoother surfaces and give them a better finish, large belt sanders were brought in sometime in the 1930s. In the last step before shipping, the bowls were sealed with mineral oil rather than lard, as was used a century ago.
