After John Oberholtzer was injured freeing the water wheel from ice, he hired James Laird to serve as miller. By 1880, Laird hired Allen Simmers as an apprentice. Simmers lived with Laird and his wife. He later purchased the Mill in 1886.

Simmers added the last significant upgrade to the Mill in c. 1906, when he replaced the Mill’s wooden water wheel with a steel water wheel manufactured by the Fitz Water Wheel Company of Hanover, Pennsylvania. He also replaced the wooden sluiceway with an iron pipe, which then conveyed the water from the mill pond to a steel forebay tank.

Anselma’s prosperity lasted through the early 1900s, when the invention of the automobile threatened the dominance of the railroads in American life, and the advent of portable gristmills mounted on pickup trucks rendered a trip to Anselma unnecessary for milling flour. The Mill suffered individually, and the community as a whole steadily lost the commercial luster of its early years. In 1919, Allen Simmers sold the Mill to Oliver E. Collins for $2,800.

Simmers documents, photographs, and artifacts