Whether it is out of passion, necessity or because of a certain reluctance towards “modernity”, diehards practice professions that seem to come from another era, not without bringing them up to date. Continuation of our series Professions of yesteryear. Today: the miller.
Although water may flow all year round under the wheel of the Éboulements mill in Charlevoix, business is slow these days for Jean-Guy Tremblay. The last miller in a long line of workers dating back to the 18th centurye century has no successors. And customers are also hard to find. The profession itself is thus threatened.
The Éboulements mill has few wrinkles despite its 234 years of age. The building could provide 50 tons of flour per year “without a struggle,” according to its 72-year-old miller. Normal production is closer to 30 tons. Unfortunately, this year, the local bakery stopped buying flour from it, and it is now sitting in the silo. “Next fall, if [le silo] is half full, I won’t fill it… There are no more outlets!”
Jean-Guy Tremblay is the oldest miller in Quebec. A descendant of the first owner, Jean-François Tremblay, he grew up within its somewhat floury walls. He still lives there today, in a small apartment adjoining the main room. He says he remembers a time when 60 bags of ground wheat were piled up on the floor “all the time.” Today, “if it stays the same,” barely 10 to 15 bags of flour come out of his millstones each week, one of the few in Quebec to operate year-round using only water power.
Only seven mills in Quebec still produce flour using ancestral methods. There are others, but most survive thanks to a museum business model rather than a commercial one. The disappearance of this sector is due to the lack of succession, but also to the lack of customers interested in artisanal flour, emphasizes the miller. “It could continue if there were opportunities. It would be profitable if it was in full swing.”
Ancient gestures, superior quality
Whether white, whole or buckwheat, the flour rises and falls in a series of conveyors before landing in the final bins. Here, everything turns in a single movement. If something gets stuck, three floors of machinery stop. The iron wheels of the Charlevoix mill are “roughly cast”, far from today’s millimeter precision. Oral tradition traces the origin of this mechanism to the forges of Saint-Maurice, the very first industrial establishment in the country.
This artisanal and laborious method provides a superior nutritional quality to the product, explains Jean-Guy Tremblay. “The more flour is heated, the more it loses its properties. In industry, it is ground so quickly that it loses its vitamins and proteins. Vitamins then have to be added. Here, it is less rushed. We are at about 100 revolutions per minute. It hardly comes out hot. The wheat is whole for real.”
The millers’ actions have become much simpler since water was transformed into electricity before it came to grinding grain. “They press on a peg, and it starts. There are warning devices if something happens. Here, you have to stay vigilant at all times.”
He bags all this powder by hand. If he takes his eyes off the final bin for too long, it risks overflowing and disrupting everything. He also has to watch out for the vagaries of nature. Jean-Guy Tremblay is always checking to see if a tree or frost is blocking the blades of the mill or destroying the dam. “You can’t go far,” sums up the man who is still very fit.
Jean-Guy Tremblay admits that he very rarely bakes bread with his own flour. He only uses his product to test his raw material, in other words “when[il] change of wheat”. And he prepares his bread… using an electric machine.
Maintenance
The Éboulements mill has already changed its purpose over time. For years, previous millers ground grain for animals “so they could digest it better.” Jean-Guy Tremblay’s father worked for Charlevoix farmers when he bought the mill in 1948, only to sell it twenty years later to the Molson family.
Passionate about this heritage, both familial and national, Jean-Guy took on the renovation work that was required at the time. Between 1985 and 1992, he renovated all of the mill’s mechanisms. Once it was restored, he restarted flour production for human consumption. The first year, they failed, he says. “The grain wasn’t good. We only had bark.”
Nothing ever runs perfectly in such a two-hundred-year-old building. Jean-Guy Tremblay had to repair the bridge leading to the mill twice. When the Dutyhe was rebuilding the gutter that supplies the mill with water. In fact, maintenance takes up most of a modern miller’s time. “The wheel is good for one end. The rest can be changed. It’s the outside that takes more time. […] It takes someone who can do everything rather than being a miller.”
Young people lend a hand from time to time, but no one stays long. “It would take two guys for six to seven months, just for maintenance,” estimates the man who, until proven otherwise, will be the last miller in Les Éboulements.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.