Seiling Milling Company
4th and Orange St., Seiling, OKThe Seiling Milling Company is significant because it was one of the few industries in the Seiling area and because its engines and milling equipment dating 1918-1935 are intact and can provide technical information about milling with steam, gas and early diesel fuel.
Seiling is located on the western edge of the Oklahoma wheat belt that extends north into Kansas. In 1917 or 1918 Fred Sander was approached by a group of local farmers, merchants and bankers about beginning a much-needed milling operation. Sander agreed and bought a Midget Marvel coal-powered steam flour mill, built a two-story wood building to house the mill, and began milling locally produced wheat into White Rose flour and distributing it in a 50-mile radius. Sander also had an agreement with the Indian agent to distribute flour to area tribes, mostly Cheyennes and Arapahoe.
The first engine used by the milling company in 1917 was a 1915 J. I. Case coal-powered steam engine. It had an 18-horsepower motor and a flywheel 41/2 feet in diameter. In 1920 Sander purchased a 25-horsepower Charter gas-powered engine that was used until 1925. In 1923 a single-cylinder Fairbanks and Morse diesel engine was purchased in Kansas City, Missouri. The engine had a 3 5/8 ton flywheel and was used to power milling operations until the mill closed in 1952. The engine is still in the engine room intact. Diesel fuel was purchased from the Champlin refinery in Enid and shipped in tank cars to Canton, Oklahoma. There the Sanders loaded it by hand into barrels and trucked it to Seiling. At the mill, the fuel was stored in two underground concrete-lined tanks.
The milling system was a Midget Marvel made in Owensboro, Kentucky ca. 1915 and purchased by Sander in 1917. This mill was called a "Short System" using a series of four: rollers to mill the flour. The first mill had a 15-barrel capacity. A barrel contained 196 pounds that produced four 48-pound sacks per barrel. The second mill was a 25-barrel mill purchased in Quinlin, Oklahoma in the early 1930s. Then in 1934-35, the third Midget Marvel short system was purchased from Hutchinson Machinery in Oklahoma City. This mill was a 50-pound mill. This mill along with part of the 25-barrel mill is still intact in the mill building.
Flour was milled in 50 and 100-pound sacks. Farmers brought in their wheat and exchanged flour for bran and shorts that Sander then sold for a feed from the feed room at the mill. A ledger entry for November 1925 shows one farmer exchanged enough wheat to receive about 1,200 pounds of flour, for the winter. The standard exchange was 36 pounds of flour for a bushel of wheat. Sacks of flour were also sold on a cash basis to country stores in small towns around Seiling.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.