By Dan Nienaber
Free Press Staff Writer
MANKATO —
A gorgeous view of Butterfield Lake was nicely framed in a window right next to Steven Vatndal Sunday afternoon, but he didn’t have much time to enjoy it.
He was too busy loading corn into a wooden feeder that carried the yellow kernels to spinning stones inside an old fashioned flour mill. When Vatndal wasn’t gently tapping the slanted feeder trough to make sure the grain flow into the mill was consistent, he was carefully loading the flour that came out of the mill into small paper bags.
The bags were eyed up to be about 1 1⁄2 pounds of flour each, but Vatndal put them on a scale next to the window to double check.
This is work the Mankato lawyer and his family have been doing for about 25 years at the annual Steam & Gas Engine Show at Voss Park in Butterfield. He was raised on a farm about two miles south of Butterfield. It was his late father, Harold, who started the family tradition of manning the replica of the Tuberg Mill.
The mill can be powered by electricity now, as it was Sunday. When it was built at Voss Park in 1976, following a design of the original mill that operated on a farm southeast of Butterfield from 1877 to 1905, wind was the only power option.
A steady 25 mph wind is needed to keep the Dutch-style mill’s wooden vanes turning fast enough to power the mill.
“That used to be the only way we did it,” Vatndal said. “I remember that because, when the wind was blowing, we used to drop everything we were doing at the farm and run over here.”
A variety of flours are ground at the mill, including corn flour, buckwheat flour and rye flour. Those bags Vatndal was filling were selling quickly at the nearby “Flour Bin” stand.
Wind power is still an option, but the electric power that was installed several years ago allows Vatndal to grind enough flour in a few days to meet the demand of people attending the show. Before the electric power was added, Vatndal’s family had to work on and off through the summer to grind enough flour to sell.
He estimated about 2,000 pounds of the flour, which is only available during the power show, would be sold through the weekend.
“We have repeat customers who come back every year,” said Florence Dunker of Mountain Lake.
She and her husband, Gary, were tending the flour stand. They use the flour, too, for pancake and bread recipes. Florence was selling bags of flour while Gary made trips between the mill and the stand to replenish the stock.
“Last year we ran completely out of grain,” Vatndal said. “Somebody around here was teaching a class on making fresh bread and they told their students to come here to get the flour. We didn’t know that. Having a few people come in and buy flour at a hundred pounds a crack, that depletes your inventory really quick.”
While Vatndal was hard at work, Margaret Adrian was standing in the shade of another nearby building while taking a photograph of the windmill.
She lives in Butterfield and has been buying flour from the mill since it was built at the engine show site. She buys about 10 pounds at each show to use for recipes throughout the year. The flour has to be frozen, she said, because it doesn’t contain the preservatives found in brand named flours.
The organic, stone ground flour improves the flavor of zwieback, Adrian said.
“It’s a German biscuit with a hat on top, that’s the best way to describe it,” she said. “It’s eaten with jelly and coffee, and it’s a lunch item as far as I’m concerned.”
The mill is only one of many old fashioned buildings at Voss Park that people can visit during the show. Most of them are manned by volunteers doing the work that would have been done in each building a century or two ago.
Many also have products for visitors to buy as they walk through the shaded grounds and listen to the “pup-pup, pup-pup, pup-pup” sound of small antique engines. Those engines, along with big ones that let out an occasional steam-driven “whoooot,” have owners standing by to answer questions.
Vatndal said he doesn’t mind being “off in the backwater,” next to the lake and away from most of the show’s action.
He’s still better at being an attorney than turning grain into flour. So he
doesn’t always have a lot of time to answer questions, including those from his clients back in Mankato.
“I have to admit I still carry my cell phone,” he said. “You get a strange reaction when you answer and say, ‘I’m in the middle of grinding flour right now, can’t we talk about this on Monday?’”
