Old Mill Stone

The bronze calls it White's mill, but the Mitchell Republic's history has Thomas Scholfield, who had run mills for years in Iowa, building it in 1879 with John R. White, a Quaker newcomer, as junior partner. As the area's first mill it ran night and day until steam mills came a few years later. White sold his share to Scholfield and turned his land into a stockyard, grain elevator, store and post office, the beginning of Riverside. The stone is pieced from fitted blocks in an iron hoop, the way French burr stones were built.

What the plaque says

Old Mill Stone Used for many years in White's Mill on "Jim" River, 4 miles east of Mitchell, to grind flour for the homesteaders and farmers who hauled their wheat to the "grist" mill In memory of my father John R. White and other pioneers of 1879 Everett A. White

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Corn Palace — 0.8 mi
  The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.
• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 2.5 mi
  A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.

More markers nearby

• Carl Gunderson: 11th Governor of South Dakota — 0.9 mi
• Indian Medicine Tree — 1.2 mi
• Firesteel — 1.6 mi
• Original Site of New Home Lutheran Church — 7.9 mi