Built in the 1880’s, the Bud Ogle tub mill in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (a short walk from Cherokee Orchard Rd, behind the Bud Ogle cabin) looks strikingly primitive when compared to the Reagan mill, built just 10 years later. To be fair, the Reagan mill was recently restored, while the Ogle mill was undergoing restoration when I visited it over the winter, having been last restored in the 1960s – still, though, the styles are quite different. The flume of the Ogle mill was created using hollowed out logs, feeding water to it from LeConte Creek, which is part of what struck me about this particular mill. In the image above, you can see the collapsed flume coming in from the left. It would have run across the top of the tripod-type structure, before running down into the turbine, which ultimately turned the mill. If you didn’t know the old mill was back there, it’d be easy to miss, as these quiet walkway trails don’t get a lot of use (many of them are essentially trails to nowhere).
As I mentioned, I really liked the old structure of the flume, and so for this particular scene I decided to highlight it, and the old cabin type structure that housed the mill. You’re not supposed to enter the structure in its current state, so I settled for illuminating it from the outside. Overhead you can see the California Nebula in its set position, along with Pleiades hiding between the tree limbs.
More next week!
–Dan Thompson