The largest log that I pulled to this mill made 240 feet of lumber. It was too heavy to load on a wagon and I had a pair of hind wheels from and old wagon of large dimension. I balanced the log about the middle with a chain over the axle and under the reach. By pulling the reach down to horizontal, it lifted most of the weight of the log, and was easily dragged six or seven miles to the mill. This mill was of great service to early people.

F. P. Reed undertook to put in a waterpower flour mill at Ashford but the reservoir

he made for reserve supply failed to hold because the ground was perforated with gopher holes. It would fill about half full and the entire supply from the creek could not raise it farther. The first and only boat that was ever in Banner county was on this reservoir where the young folks of Ashford would float around in the narrow confines of its bordering banks and dream of Venice. "Youth is our Italy and Greece -- full of gods and temples."

The mill was never completed. Reed gave it up and went to Coatsburg, Illinois, where he fell from an upper floor in a mill there, into the engine room and was instantly killed by breaking his neck.

In the early nineties the farmers alliance movement swept over Banner county and Jimmy Burton, E. M. White, Martin Montz, and others around Harrisburg were enthusiastic, making trips out to the sod school houses, fighting bed bugs and fleas, as well as the pirates of finance that were then on one of their periodical squeezes or sprees.