SOUTH ROYALTON — Under pressure from town officials, the owner of a derelict former grain mill here has begun to tear the structure down, which could clear the way for housing on the site.
The former Windsor County Feed and Supply grain mill closed in December 1995. It had been in business since 1909. After it closed it went through a couple of different owners before Eric Jacobs purchased it in 2004. Jacobs owns multiple rental properties in the White River Valley and is currently based in Burlington.
Since then, the building has been allowed to deteriorate. The letters of the Windsor County Feed sign fell off or were taken. The building’s metal siding flapped and screeched in the wind.
Last fall, the Royalton Selectboard reached out to the owners of six properties in town, including the grain mill, warning that if the properties weren’t cleaned up they would be declared a public nuisance. Jacobs attended a public hearing on Oct. 16 and told the town he had hired contractors to tear the building down.
“Mr. Jacobs has been very compliant,” Town Administrator Ryan Britch said in a phone interview.
The mill sits on a 0.6-acre parcel that’s served by municipal water and sewer, which makes it a candidate for housing development.
“Ideally, what the Selectboard would like to see is affordable housing going in,” Britch said, adding that Jacobs told the board that he would like to recoup some of the cost of demolition. Whether that’s affordable housing in the sense that it’s federally subsidized, or just new housing units that would help ease the local and regional shortage is still up for discussion, Britch said.
The minutes of the Oct. 16 public hearing say that Jacobs “stated that he would like to build housing at this location.” At least one board member expressed concern about the size of a potential housing development in a neighborhood consisting mainly of single-family homes.
But in a brief phone conversation, Jacobs said he had no immediate plans. The property is listed for sale on a website affiliated with Jacobs’ business, Fergessen Management, which oversees his rental properties, most of which are in South Royalton. The web listing for the grain mill includes a photograph that shows a sizable apartment building on the site.
Town residents who recall the grain mill as a going concern said they were sad to see it torn down, but acknowledged that it was overdue for demolition.
Theresa Manning has lived next door to the mill since 1971. A cinder block building in front of the tall, steel-sided mill housed the mill’s boiler. It had a light on a pole that turned red if there was trouble with the boiler.
“We, as neighbors, minded that light,” Manning said in a phone interview. The mill owner would give them a turkey or ham every year for their vigilance.
“It’s just very sad to see a landmark like that go to such lengths of decay,” she said. Town residents should pay close attention to Jacobs’ plans for the site, she said.
For most of the 20th century, the mill was part of a row of feed operations in South Royalton that served the area’s many small dairy farms. Eastern States, and later Agway, were in the space now occupied by Crossroads Bar and Grill, and Braley’s Feed Store, the town’s last, closed in 1998.
At the grain mill, feed and raw materials arrived by railcar, and the mill and other businesses had a separate siding. The mill produced pellets and mixed feeds out of corn, oats, wheat middlings, soy beans, molasses and other ingredients.
“It was a very old-fashioned mixing,” Charles Bascom, who moved to Royalton in 1977 to take a job at the mill. It was owned at the time by a company based in Albany, N.Y., Barber & Bennett.
The mill had eight or nine employees and delivered feed as far south as Walpole, N.H., and north to Williamstown, Vt. Bascom was one of two salesmen who visited farms in the area. The mill also sold feed in bags, and some farmers would come in and buy six or seven tons of bagged feed at a time, Bascom said.
All told, the mill probably delivered “a little over 200 tons a week,” he said. The mill also sold fertilizer, seed corn and other farm necessities.
Royalton alone had around 20 farms, and most of those farms milked 30 to 40 cows, Bascom said.
The Ainsworth Farm, Royalton’s last dairy operation, sold its cows in 2024.
Before Barber & Bennett’s ownership, the mill was run by a farmer-owned cooperative. Around the time it closed, the mill was owned by Windsor County Feed and Supply, which also had an outpost in Windsor. A company bookkeeper embezzled $158,000 from 1992 to 1994, and pleaded guilty to five counts of embezzlement in 1999, years after the crimes led to the company’s bankruptcy.
An organic grain company that had reopened the feed mill in Bethel in 1994, three years after Cargill had closed it, paid $24,000 for the mill in September 1997, in the hope of reopening it. While the Bethel mill remains up and running, the South Royalton mill never reopened.
“I got feed there for a little while, before it went bankrupt,” Bob Hull, who farmed in Royalton and was the town’s longstanding constable, said. He isn’t sentimental about the mill, though, noting that he’s heard for years that it would someday be torn down for housing development. The building’s in bad shape.
“Every once in a while it looks like a piece of that siding might blow off and cut someone in half,” he said.
That’s what led town officials to act, Britch, the town administrator, said.
“Our main concern was that the property was at imminent risk of collapse,” he said. There was evidence that kids were sneaking into the building, he said.
The enforcement against the mill and the other properties — four of the five of which have been addressed, Britch said — heralds a change in town leadership. As town administrators have been overwhelmed by the workload, the town split the job into town administration and finance director, which has given Britch time to pursue “necessary projects like this,” he said.
Trucks and excavators occupy the small lawn between Pleasant Street and the mill building, which now has a big gash down its center, exposing some of the building’s interior.
The Selectboard’s action gave Jacobs 120 days to remove the mill. If that schedule holds, work should be complete this spring.