The Roller Mill

By Brennan Engle

A family member of the man who started the first mill and elevator in Phillipsburg donated rare photographs of the first Phillipsburg mills to the Phillips County Historical Society.

The photos, donated by Jim Griffin, of Tecumseh, Kansas, show the early mill and elevator structures owned by his family in Phillipsburg at the turn of the 20th century.

Griffin is the great-nephew of William Chelf, who, in 1899, built the first “roller mills” in Phillipsburg, as the mill and elevator were colloquially referred to at the time. (See image below.)

William Chelf, the mill’s founder and owner, is standing at the right on the dock.

In 1899, the roller mill technology for milling wheat into flour was a marked improvement over the previous grist mills that utilized a rotating stone to grind wheat.

Chelf was one of 12 children who had migrated with their parents from Kentucy to Smith County in 1883, followed by the family getting into the mill business in western Kansas in the 1890s. By the time William Chelf constructed the mill at the northwest corner of C Street and 4th Street three blocks north of the Courthouse in Phillipsburg, his brothers James, Richard, and Charles Chelf were running miles of their own in Colvy, Goodland, Atwood, and Kiowa, Kansas.

In a proposal for the construction of a roller mill in Phillipsburg, William Chelf asked the community for a gift of $2,500 or an interest-free loan of that amount to be repaid within a year with a mortgage on the mill. He also asked local retailers to purchase flour exclusively from the mill for 60 days. In response, a local committee raised a gift of $500 for the effort, with retail stores agreeing to charge retail price for the flour and give Chelf the profit on all flour sold for 60 days.

The mill and elevator facility was constructed in late 1899 and was the first steam-powered roller mill in Phillips County. It featured six stands of double rollers and had a capacity of producing 80-100 barrels of flour daily.

Operation began in January 1900, with Chelf adding a 15,000-bushel elevator on the north side of the mill in the summer of 1901.

Disaster struck on November 29, 1901, when the mill was completely destroyed by a fire that started in the coal house on the mill’s south end. Chelf was away in Clay Center, Kansas, when the fire occurred. It was an estimated loss of $21,000, and news reports stated Chelf earned $13,000 worth of insurance.

In 1902, Chelf built a new, significantly larger roller mill at a cost of $23,000 (equivalent of $900,000 in today’s value). The new facility could produce 350 barrels of flour per day. Also constructed was a stone engine house that contained the 24-horsepower Corlis engine.

In 1903, William Chelf sold the mill and elevator to Louis Champlain and A. W. Robertson for $20,000. They were local businessmen who had operated a grain elevator at the Rock Island Railroad Depot. The mill was sold again in 1904 to William Bandt and his partner by the last name of Blauer.

Chelf remained in Phillips County until 1905 when he sold his residence in Dana (Gretna) and elevators to Brandt located in Dresden, Dellvale, Calvert, Prairie View, Stuttgart, and Dana. The Phillipsburg elevator would be known for several decades thereafter as the Bandt Mill and Elevator.

By 1911, William Chelf was running a mill in Leoti, Kansas, and purchasing grain for a Kansas City firm. In 1913, he also had a side business as a dealer of Pope Motorcycles.

Within a few years, the Chelf family members sold all the mill businesses in western Kansas. Some of the clan moved to Wabaunsee County, near Harveyville, Kansas, to farm with others returning to their roots in Kentucky.

William Chelf, with his wife and children, was one of the ones who relocated to the Bluegrass State. Years later, he would die in a sawmill accident in 1924 while working in Virginia at age 54.

In 1907, the City of Phillipsburg contracted with the Phillipsburg Mill and Elevator Company to build an electric plant that would provide the city with electricity and install street lighting in specific locations within the city.

It appears a grain elevator had been constructed a block south of the Roller Mill, with historical plat map evidence indicating that a light plant was installed at the north end of that elevator.

Interestingly, and perhaps coincidentally, that same site where the electric power plant was built in 1907 is also, 117 years later, the site for an electrical switching substation.