From the first mill to the last swim

By 1879, most of the settlers had moved to the present site of Bunkerville. New homes were under construction along with more fields and irrigation canals being added to the irrigation system.

The valley’s first grist mill was located about halfway between Bunkerville and Settler’s Point. The irrigation canal at that point was about 15 feet above the fields and a large pipe was placed in the irrigation canal to drop the water to another canal, called the “Gin Ditch”. This man-made waterfall provided the power for this first grist mill and a cotton gin. At this time, there were three mills in Bunkerville. A molasses mill, a grist mill, and a cotton gin. Later that same year Bunkervillecould boast of a wheat harvester.

The grist and cotton mill were extremely primitive. A small wood shack housing a grinding stone connected to a water wheel, and a lumber platform for the silk siftingprocess. The wheat from this mill was closer to bran than flour. The silk sifting process was difficult to keep functioning.

The people of Bunkerville then constructed a modem grist mill within the town proper. It was a two-story adobe building about thirty feet wide and seventy-five feet long. On the east end of the building was the grist wheel, a large rockcreased with crevices for the flour to sift out of the wheel. The rock wheel wasattached to a three-foot iron rod with a gear wheel on the bottom which meshed into another iron rod and gear wheel attached to the water wheel outside of themill. This grist mill provided flour for the people of the valley for a decade or so. Then, a new more modern mill was constructed in Mesquite. It was called the Peacock Flour Mill and the valley farmers would take their wheat to this mill where it was ground into flour and used throughout the valley and shipped as far away as Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles, California.

None of the grist mills in the valley were ever able to produce bleached flour. After WWI, the people of the United States were demanding bleached flour. The Peacock Mill could not afford to meet these demands and went out of business.

This was a great loss to the local farmers who had been able to harvest wheat as a cash crop that could be sold at home to the Peacock Mill. When the mill failed, the farmers had to find a new cash producer and many farmers turned to dairying as a means of raising cash. The era of grist mills in Virgin Valley ended.

The grist mill in Bunkerville was turned into an ice plant. The Ice Plant was quite successful between the time it came into operation until electrical power came to the valley. Refrigerators, using ice as the cooling agent, were in many homes, and the ice plant served as a cool place for the town residents to store milk, and other perishable products for future use.

When electricity arrived, the Ice Plant was no longer needed and the ice plant/grist mill building became a playground for the young boys in Bunkerville. A game, unique to Bunkerville, was played in and around this old mill. The game used strips of rubber car inner tubes to make elastic bands that could fly nearly 50 feet. Instead of using toy guns to play cowboys and Indians, the Bunkerville boys would play teams against one another, shooting each other with these elastic rubber bands. Once hit anywhere below the head, you were dead until the game was over and a new game began.

Next to the old mill was a waterfall. The irrigation canal dropped off the bench at this point about 12 feet. A cement pad extended off the cliff at the end of the canal and the water dropped into hole about 60 feet in circumference. The boys dammed the bottom end of this water hole with brush and driftwood and the resulting pool was about six feet deep with a large bubble in the middle caused by the waterfall. The bubble pushed the water to the sides of the pool, so it was a very good place to learn to swim, as the water naturally pushed everyone to the side of the pool. For years, “the Falls” were for boys only and sans clothing was common. After a hard day of playing in the old mill, the boys would cool off with a swim at the falls. It wasn’t long before the girls of the town would no longer put up with sans clothing excuse used by the boys and the girls began swimming at the falls also. The only change being the boys now had to wear swimming clothes or be caught naked!