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ATKINS, FREEMAN--Page 1
"The first mill in Truro was not built so easily as the last one, however, which appeared about 1800...Every stick of lumber used in it came ashore from wrecks, most of it landing in a single windfall when a lumber schooner piled up on the outer beach; it would not have been surprising if the corn ground at this mill had had a salty flavor--the more so as Freeman Atkins, the miller, was a retired shipmaster."
--Henry Kittredge, "Cape Cod: Its People And Their History", pg. 74
--Truro, Cape Cod, or Land Marks and Sea Marks |
"The frame was of Southern tun timber...as landed from a vessel stranded on the back of the Cape...its tall arms and one long leg the mast of a dismantled schooner. "On the wall of the first loft, nailed against the timbers, was a plain-deal board about eighteen by forty inches, on which, carved by some educated jack-knife, were these letters: F. A.
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The same source gives a physical description of him:
"I see him now, in my mind's eye. A tall man, with long arms like his mill; kindly blue eyes, angular face, prominent nose, and close shut lips, with a lingering of the old quarter-deck compression still revealed."
Finally:
"This old man with his grist mill, and salt works, and patch of cornfield, and semi-weekly newspaper, was no every-day man. In his younger days as sailor and master of a ship, he had seen the world. The old miller has ceased from his labors, and the sound of the grinding is low.
A stone to his memory in the Congregational churchyard has the following:
He came down to the gravelike a shock of corn fully ripe
In memory of
Capt.
Freeman Atkins
Died
November 1, 1855
AE 79 years 1 mo
& 14 days
Though time had set the seal of years upon his brow,
Yet still that brow bowed not beneath the weight of care,
Till by the reaper's hand in Death's embrace laid low,
Like shock of golden grain well prepared
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