QUERN

1845

X1904.01.05 a-b

Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet founded St. Mary's Mission in 1841, and the Jesuits began harvesting crops there in 1842. Initially, there was no mill, so wheat was ground by hand with a mortar and pestle or roasted or boiled for mush. Father Anthony Ravalli brought this set of Belgian buhrstones to the mission in 1845, where he constructed Montana's first grist mill. The mill could grind a dozen bushels of grain daily into graham, or whole wheat, flour with these stones, which are sixteen and twenty inches in diameter. The mission closed by the end of the decade, and in Montana's first written conveyance of property, Major John Owen purchased its mill, buildings, and fields, establishing Fort Owen in 1850. The Jesuits reclaimed the buhrstones in 1857 and moved them to their mission at St. Ignatius, where the stones remained until the Jesuits donated them to the Montana Historical Society in 1904.