Champion Mill

Champion is a hamlet on Frenchman Creek in Chase County, and its mill has run on creek water since the 1880s. Thomas Scott was given land and water rights in exchange for a promise to build a mill. A dam went in around 1887 at a natural three-foot rock fall on the creek, and flour and feed production began by 1889. The mill burned in December 1891 and reopened about a year later, so its oldest sections date to 1892. It switched to feed only in 1945, ran commercially until 1968, and History Nebraska calls it probably the oldest functioning water-powered mill in the state.

The creek is the other half of the story. Frenchman Creek rises in Phillips County, Colorado, and was historically fed by springs. Its flow has fallen sharply since the 1950s, and a University of Nebraska study of the years 1941 to 2009 found that pumping from irrigation wells and canal diversions account for 74 percent of the loss, with up to 60 percent of pumped water drawn from the creek itself.

Nebraska Game and Parks bought the mill in 1969, and the mill, dam and headrace went on the National Register as a historic district in 1988. After a severe flood and hailstorm the state rebuilt the dam, raceways and shoreline and reroofed the mill, then handed the 11-acre park, most of it the mill pond, to Chase County. The mill is open summer afternoons, and six campsites with electric hookups sit by the water.