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Introduction
This article is the second of a three-part series describing the production of flour in the eighteenth century through the life of Thomas Livezey. Livezey was born in 1723/24 in an area of modern-day Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Part I described his formative years, the period of his apprenticeship, and the purchase and siting of his mill. It also delved into the life of Quakers in Pennsylvania at that time. Part II will examine transportation and marketing and the development of his home, Glen Fern, and the mill complex. The final part will discuss more of Livezey' s business practices and his public life.
The Livezey family used the same Christian names over and within generations. To help keep things clear, Charles Smith in his genealogy of the family numbered the members of each generation; that system is used throughout these articles. The first number in the brackets following a person's name refers to the generation. Generation 1 was the first Thomas and generation 2 that of his son, Jonathan, and so on. The second number refers to an individual's birth place within a generation. A [[6-15] following a name would indicate that the individual was in the sixth generation of Livezeys and the fifteenth birth within that specific generation of descendants of the first Thomas.
Much of the information for this work comes from the Livezey Family Papers and in particular from Livezey's diary, which he called his Book of Buildings, and his various account books. Because there will be references to figures in each part of the series, the figures are numbered consecutively beginning with Part I.
Transportation and Markets for Flour
Adequate water flow was not the only early-eighteenth century mill requirement; the other was adequate transportation systems and infrastructure. This requirement was particularly critical for large mills, which required good roads to get grain to the mill and finished flour to customers - including to the wharves along Front Street in Philadelphia for export overseas. At the peak of flour production in America, grain had to be transported as far as one hundred miles from the Livezey Mill. (Figure 15 shows a 1915 photograph of Livezey' s home, Glen Fern, the mill dam, and the northern corner of the mill, which...