The feed mill Anderson Dell built for H. O. Andrews

In the summer of 1908 H. O. Andrews and some area farmers pooled an order and had the first rail car of feed shipped into Mapleton, a car of shelled corn. The Mapleton Centennial book of 1966 tells it that way; the nomination says he and a group of area farmers began buying feed by the rail car load. Andrews had come to Mapleton about 1903 to run a stave mill in the mountains, and the feed business grew out of the stave mill and his contracting interests.

In the spring of 1914 Andrews hired Anderson Dell to put up a mill for grinding and storing feed on the north side of West Main Street. It is a frame building forty feet by thirty five, three and a half stories tall, with wood clapboarding, a concrete block foundation and a cross gabled metal roof; a small fourth story section holds the top of the elevator. A railroad siding ran along its north side. The nomination says he soon added a coal and lumber storage shed and became a coal dealer as well; the centennial's history of the west end has him selling coal and feed there from the spring of 1908. He also installed equipment for milling flour, but the nomination says that line lasted only a few years, and the centennial book says the flour mill ran only during the First World War.

Additions followed: a two story frame addition and a run of semi-open lumber and coal bins on the east side in the 1920s, a one story addition on the west, and over the years four large frame storage sheds. In 1936 the flood put thirteen inches of water on the mill's first floor, and in 1937 a warehouse went up at the upper end of the grounds, above any flood level then known.

The nomination, prepared in November 1989, presents the property as an early twentieth century feed mill complex that still worked as a mill, under the Industrial Resources of Huntingdon County listing. By then the business was called Mapleton Farm and Garden, in the same buildings, with much of the original milling equipment still in use. The first car of grain into the new building in 1914 was shelled corn, and H. O. Andrews Sr. and W. H. Andrews Sr. unloaded it themselves with half bushel measures, carried in and dumped into the bins.

This feed and, later, flour mill developed as an outgrowth of H.O. Andrews' stave mill and contracting interests.National Register of Historic Places nomination, H.O. Andrews Feed Mill (reference 90000399), section 8, continuation page 2 (PDF page 5) · character 5,463 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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