Historic gristmill gets new life

VAN BUREN – It was hard to tell who was happier on Saturday during the ribbon cutting for the A.O. Violette Industrial Building at the Acadian Village: the man whose family’s 150-year-old mill has been re-created or the couple who played a major role in the project.

With wide smiles, Gideon Corriveau and Alderic O. “Dick” and Alice Violette were on hand for the grand opening of the newest building at the Acadian Village, a history-themed center, which strives to preserve Acadian heritage and culture.

Corriveau and his family beamed with pride during a walk-through of the building, noting the placement of the heavy equipment. Local historians had tried to re-create the original mill’s setup down to the last detail, building the new structure up around the equipment.

Corriveau’s ancestors had used the equipment to run a wool-carding and gristmill mill in Frenchville. In its heyday, the mill ran 24 hours a day and processed up to eight barrels of buckwheat flour per hour. On the National Register of Historic Places in the state of Maine since 1994, the historic building was declared unsafe and torn down in August.

As workers razed the aging structure, Corriveau removed a semi-truck trailer and six utility trailers full of machinery bound for a new home at the Acadian Village. He had fretted about the equipment’s historical significance, but his concerns were allayed, in large part, because of another family with deep roots in Van Buren.

Dick and Alice Violette are charter members of the Acadian Village. When Anne Roy, the history center’s director, told the couple about the mill, Dick Violette said they knew they had to do something.

“We knew if it was ever sold [the machinery], it would leave the [St. John] Valley forever,” he said before the ribbon cutting. “We thought we should try to get it and bring it to the Acadian Village where it would be saved forever.”

Violette declined to say how much the project cost, but conceded that it was tens of thousands of dollars.

Roy, for her part, was ecstatic at the event.

“This is a big day,” she told the crowd. “I thought it [the new building] was going to be a dream, but the dream was made possible.”

As for Corriveau, he was busy giving tours at the new building and explaining to people how the machinery actually worked. He started working with the equipment as a teen in the 1930s and didn’t stop processing buckwheat at the gristmill until the 1980s.

His wife, Aline, spoke on his behalf.

“Knowing it’s taken care of, I think he feels good about that,” she said, “because now he knows it’s being kept for the next generation.”