Hildebrand Mill

Water-powered mills, whether for grinding grain or cutting lumber, played a vital role on the frontier where lack of transportation facilities made goods and supplies from the outside hard to come by and a shortage of cash often made their purchase impossible even when they were available. The Hildebrand" (Beck) Mill on Flint Creek, in what is now the Delaware County section of the old Cherokee Nation, was one of the better-known of these mills. It handled all grains as well as timber. It was in service to the community for a century and more. And throughout the Civil War, interestingly enough, it played a somewhat ambiguous role, serving the commissary needs, at one time or another, of forces of both the North and the South. Finally, as a last fillip to its claim to the protection of National Register status Hildebrand Mill featured in one of the more celebrated acts of violence in Indian Territory (Civil War battles excluded) ... an armed clash between white and Indian judicial systems that ended with what may be the only informal "peace treaty" ever made between the United States and a single individual.

The original Hildebrand Mill was built in 1845 or shortly thereafter by Jeremiah C. Towers. It contained two sets of buhrs - one for
Note should be taken here of the wide-spread variation to be found in the spelling of this important Cherokee family name. The Patriarch of the family, according to Emmett Starr's History of the Cherokee Indians (1922), was John Hildebrand, a native of Germany. He had five children by his first wife, a German, and four by his second, Susannah Womancatcher, a Cherokee. Succeeding generations of large families produced a large number of Hildebrands, of varying degrees of Cherokee blood... and a bewildering variety of spellings. Starr gives the genealogy of no less than 64 Hildebrands, with that spelling. Unfortunately, the 1835 Census of Cherokees taken before their removal to Indian Territory, gives the name Hilderbrand, and the Final Rolls of the Cherokees, prepared in 1902, give it Hilderbrand. Elsewhere in print are such additional spellings as Hilderbrandt, Helterbrand, and Hilderbrand. For what it's worth the post office at the site from August 3, 1866, to June 25, 1889, was Hilderbrand. Throughout this nomination, Hildebrand will be used, in deference to Starr as a recognized genealogist. The decision should not be taken as either final or official.

corn, the other for wheat. Made of marble, they were brought from France to New Orleans, up the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers to Fort Gibson, then finally to the Flint Creek site by oxcart. The corn buhr remains in the mill. The other was lost, probably in the same 1892 flood that de- stroyed the first mill and much of the other original machinery, including the overshot wooden wheel, twenty feet in diameter and fed by a 300- foot-long flume.

Shortly after completing the mill Towers sold it to Stephen Hildebrand. (Here again, confusion exists, as some written records refer to the new owner as Peter Hildebrand, an uncle of Stephen and a man of means in Tennessee before coming to Indian Territory where, according to Starr, he operated "a saw, turning and grist mill." He died on Dec. 11, 1851. However, Stephen was the son of Michael, a brother of Peter. Michael was also a slave-owning man of substance in Tennessee, and the owner of two mills, so Stephen grew up with a strong milling background. His presumed ownership is based on his marriage to Pauline Beck.) Hildebrand made many improvements in the mill. The original mill race was four feet square. He hired two Irishmen to double these dimensions to make it eight feet wide, eight feet deep. They were paid two thousand dollars in gold for the job a not inconsiderable job that took them two years, as the flume was over 300 feet long and much of it had to be out through beds of solid limestone.

Sometime before the Civil War, Stephen Hildebrand married Pauline ("Aunt Polly") Beck. This not only brought the Beck family name into the history of Hildebrand Mill but also laid the foundation for controversy and bloody strife that soon surrounded it. When the war broke out, the Becks cast their lot with the South. Meanwhile, another old Cherokee family, the Proctors (said to be related to the Becks by marriage) followed the dictates of their strong Union sympathies. Quite possibly the strong animosity that grew up between the two families had its roots in the war years. The mill was used extensively during the Civil War. There are many references to it in the Official Records and both sides, at one time or another, using the facility as part of their commissary activities. Quite possibly, too, there were additional reasons, now obscured by the passage of time, for the ill feeling between the two families. At any rate, when "Aunt Polly" Beck, following Hildebrand's death, married Frank Kester's son, a white man, the stage for the "Battle of Going Snake" was set.

It was the loss of some of Kester's son's cattle that triggered the conflict. One Ezekiel ("Zeke") Proctor had often been in trouble with the law and the Kestersons charged him with theft. Zeke, in return, sent word he would kill Kesterson, and on Febr. 14, 1872, he went to the mill to make good his threat. Finding both Kesterson and his wife outside the mill, he walked to within a few feet of them and opened fire. Mrs. Beck, trying to rush between them, received a bullet from Proctor's guns in her abdomen. She died a few hours later and Proctor went "on the scout."

The next two years demonstrated the problem of law enforcement in Indian Territory after the Civil War, which had caused a certain deterioration in the quality of the Indians' own judicial system. At this time the Cherokee Nation treaty with the United Station provided that no Cherokee could be tried in U. S. courts unless the litigation involved both races. Additionally, cases involving only whites were to be tried in U. S. courts, while those involving only Cherokees were to be heard in the Cherokee courts. Mrs. Beck, of course, was Cherokee, as was Proctor. But the Cherokee courts at the time were inclined to be weak, or worse. Proctor was finally induced to surrender, but his trial was delayed so often that the Becks lost patience. They went instead to the white man's court in Fort Smith, Ark., persuading U. S. Commissioner J. O. Churchill to issue a writ for Proctor's arrest for murder. This was on April 11, 1874.

A posse was promptly dispatched to carry out the writ. But word had sped ahead in the meantime to alert Proctor, by then on trial in a Cherokee court sitting in a log school house in Going Snake district. Such were the unsettled conditions in Indian Territory at this time that Proctor and his friends were all armed, albeit in the courtroom. When the posse arrived, on April 15, gunfire broke out on both sides. By the time the battle had ended, eleven (possibly 12) men were dead, including two federal marshals. Proctor himself was only wounded.

The U. S. courts belatedly decided to live up to the Cherokee treaty restrictions and refused to prosecute Proctor. But the U. S. marshal's office did have him captured. After threatening him with prosecution, a "peace treaty" was agreed to and Proctor went free under the agreement to become a law-abiding citizen. From all accounts he did.

Hildebrand Mill was extremely busy in the 1870s cutting up nearby timber. Planing mill and shingle mill operations were added. Then when indiscriminate timber cutting was finally halted, Hildebrand became more important as a grist mill. It was capable of handling from 12 to 20 bushels of grain per hour. Yet despite this capacity, there was often a backlog of grain to be ground. The mill's location on or near several main roads through this section of the Cherokee Nation made it a focal point of activity. The so-called "Hildebrand Road" even supported a toll gate at one time near the present town of Kansas, just to the southwest.

Following the disastrous flood of 1892, Aaron Headin Beck (who had bought the mill from his Aunt Polly some years before she was killed) was not able to rebuild immediately. But by 1907 he had the present 40-foot- high structure complete. He had hoped to install flour milling machinery, hence its height. Instead, he reinstalled the original corn buhr. In place of the overshot wooden wheel, however, he put in a more efficient water turbine that also drove a corn sheller and a mill for grinding feed for cattle. The grist mill was last run by water in 1935. A gasoline engine was last used in 1967 to run the sawmill. But most of the old mill's impressive machinery is still in place and, despite the appearance of the building's exterior, in a quite good condition.

Hildebrand Mill may have ended for good its century-and-a-quarter of service to the hill people of the old Cherokee Nation. But it sits placidly beside Flint Creek meanwhile, seemingly ready and willing to start up its old machinery once more, if given the opportunity.