The Thorp Mill is an old flour mill originally built in 1883 that has been beautifully restored. It is striking see the before and after pictures of the building online. The before picture makes me wonder if they had to completely rebuild the walls because the building looks like it's about to topple over. After walking through the place, I can confirm that not all the walls have been rebuilt. The walls around the milling equipment look like they are a hundred years old and would be very drafty in the winter.
The milling equipment is in remarkable condition for being 100 years old. I'm sure none of it works now but it's easy to see how it might have worked and the full milling process. One interesting fact is that the grain has to run through the mill 13 times before it is ground down enough to be flour. That would be a tremendous amount of energy and machining to create one bag of flour.
In order to create the mill, they diverted the Yakima River water into manmade pools before it flowed through the mill, powering the machines. These pools froze over in the winter, creating another product that could be shipped East: ice. They chopped the ice into large blocks then stored them in sawdust to be sold at a later time. It was an early example of a seasonal business: flour in the summer and ice in the winter. read more