Heirs Hope to Preserve 200-Year-Old Grist Mill

Down backcountry roads that lead to the rural Tennessee town of Leoma lies a single family’s homestead holding generations of history.

But for the eleven heirs of G.T. and Florence Wilburn, living in a bucolic property with hillsides of virgin timber and rows of crops and pasture land, has become more responsibility than they are equipped to handle.  With the grandchildren and great grandchildren spread across the country, they are ready to surrender the $2 million grist mill filled with centuries of memories. 

“I feel like I will be losing my family heritage,” says G.T.’s great-grandson Mark Wilburn.  “It’s all I’ve known my whole life.  It’s emotional for me.”  G.T.’s grandson and the current caretaker of the home place says, “This place needs someone to take it, preserve it and bring it back to the way that it was, and may family can’t do that.” 

The grist mill was built as many as three times.  It became the centerpiece of the Wilburn family storyline in 1909, four decades after its final reconstruction, when its owners commissioned G.T. Wilburn to manage the operation and the general store across the way. 

Roger Wilburn says that it is common for the country folk to come by, “The place is part of them.”  For some family members, the possibility of having someone preserve the place is more magnificent than the sorrow of having to let go. 

See Jessica Bliss, Heirs Hope A Buyer Can Save 200-Year-Old Tenn. Mill, USA Today, Dec. 7, 2014.