Haines Mill Museum
Lehigh Co. | Pennsylvania | USA
Watersource: Cedar Creek
Haines Mill Museum
Cetronia, Pa. near Dorney Park. The mill is itself part of Lehigh Co. Park System. On Haines Mill Road off Broadway, west of Pa 29 at Cetronia on Cedar Creek.
This excellent condition mill is a 4.5 story, 40x60 foot stone building with a 15x60x three story addition of brick. The whole mill is painted white with brown trim.
The front gable end is clad in clapboard, an area that includes the upper two doors out of five. A 12x15 ft. cupola or short clorestry sits atop the center peak.
Add a slate roof, and the mill is in great shape as seen here in this 1982 photograph.
John George Knauss purchased the land in 1759 from father-in-law, Joseph Bishop. Bishop had aquired the land from William Penn's sons, Thomas and Richard in 1738.
The office section of the mill. The Knauss family operated the mill until 1853. A period of 14 years are unaccounted for, then Solomon Lichenwalner took over ownership in 1867.
The Lichtenwalner family sold to Jacob Haines in 1906 and several years later a fire left nothing but the bare outside walls. This photo shows the scale in the center with various wooden chutes and elevatore clustered close to the support posts.
Rebuilt in 1909, the undershot wheel was replaced by a more efficient turbine and the mill was streamlined with rollers some of which are shown here on the left. The machine in the distant right is an atrition machine.
The Haines sold the mill in 1952 and production ceased in 1956. From 1972 to 1974, the mill was restored as an operating mill museum as part of Lehigh County's growing park system.
Once one of six original mills on Cedar Creek, it had still been kept company by two others that had survived; The Saeger/Romig Mill and the Hawk Mill. About June 2006, the Saeger/Romig Mill was demolished along with the stone miller's house.
This small two-story building is perhaps a spring house or an ancillary house for the mill complex.
The brick miller's house across from the front of the mill is pictured here.
The mill was restored in 1909, and since has been developed in the 1960's into a Lehigh Co. Historical Museum with a County Park adjacent for picnicking and play. Notice the nice selection of rainbow trout in the headrace.
The restored mill is open April through October, 1:00 am-4:00 pm, and exhibits farming and milling techniques from the turn of the century. The trout from the above photo are swimming in the inlet off Cedar Creek all the way down to the actual forebay.