It Happened in Middlebury – Middlebury apple cider making

#Middlebury

The inside of the cider mill shows how the horse-powered mill was set up to grind apples into cider. The initials on the center stone are those of James D. Wooster. (Photo courtesy Michael Dooling)

By DR. ROBERT L. RAFFORD

“By 1775 one out of every ten farms in New England owned and operated its own cider mill.” So states Ben Watson, author of a delightful volume about the history of cider, and, more important, how to make your own (“Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own,” third edition, 2013; Woodstock, Vt.: The Countryman Press, 1999). For many in the 18th and 19th centuries, local water was not always reliable, so apple cider was usually a better alternative (and, of course, it tasted better!).

Middlebury had many mills on the numerous brooks that populate our beautiful town. Brooks enabled industries to be built, including those that manufactured or refined axes, bricks, knives, cotton, pins, files, lumber and cider and more, and the Middlebury Historical Society has some of these articles on display. Other mills were horse-powered, as was the cider mill operated by the Wooster family of Middlebury.

The Wooster cider mill may have been operated by David and Ann (Doolittle) Wooster and passed to their son, James Doolittle Wooster. James was born just after the American Revolution commenced, in 1778, and lived in Middlebury all his life, dying just before Christmas on Dec. 22, 1856. He is buried in the Gunntown Cemetery just south of his South Street home. The Gunntown section of Naugatuck is named after the Gunn family that lived in the region for many years (our first first selectman was Larmon Gunn Townsend, whose mother was a Gunn). The 1807 petition to the Connecticut General Assembly, which established Middlebury as a distinct town, was signed by 111 Middlebury residents, including James Doolittle Wooster, Daniel Wooster and David Wooster, probably all sons of David and Ann (Doolittle) Wooster of Middlebury.

The Wooster family lived in an historic house on South Street famed for being a house in which a local lad, Chauncey Judd, was held prisoner by British sympathizers about 1780 – as described in the 1874 book, “Chauncey Judd or The Stolen Boy” by Israel Perkins Warren – while they decided whether he should live or die. Some of the Wooster family were loyal to the British cause during the Revolution, so their house on South Street was a perfect hiding place. Whether they offered young Chauncey apple cider as he languished in their cellar hiding place is not recorded.

The Wooster mill consisted of a circular, horizontal collection of granite stones upon which a large and heavy wheel, anchored in the middle of the circle, was rotated along the stones in a circle. As the wheel turned, it crushed any apples underneath and reduced them to juice for the cider and a pulp suited to making apple sauce or butter. Upon the center stone were engraved the initials “J. D. W.” (James D. Wooster) and the date of “1815.” David Wooster, James’s father, died in 1812. The 1815 date may have signified the date that James and his wife, Mary Ann, and their family took over the cider mill, or perhaps established it. They were primarily farmers, but I’m certain their cider mill was an essential part of their business for many years.

Bob Rafford is the Middlebury Historical Society president and Middlebury’s municipal historian. To join or contact the society, visit MiddleburyHistoricalSociety.org or call Bob at 203-206-4717.