GRIST FOR THE MILL
WHEN TURNER BOOTH PONDERED BUYING THE RUNDOWN GLEN ARBOR MILL, LITTLE DID HE KNOW HOW MUCH ITS PAST WOULD SHAPE ITS FUTURE—AND HIS. by Elizabeth Edwards
F
ive years ago, Turner Booth, a young real estate attorney who’d been working in New York City, took a career breather and relocated to Glen Arbor where he’d summered since he was a child. Initially, he stayed in his parents’ home at The Homestead resort just north of town. His route to and from the small downtown took him past the old mill. With its broken windowpanes and peeling white paint, the massive, three-story building set on a small peninsula looped by the sandy-bottomed Crystal River was hauntingly handsome. Like most folks who live or vacation in Glen Arbor, Booth wondered what was going to become of the old structure—neither the mill nor the sweet Queen Anne–style miller’s house that sits next to it looked like they could withstand many more Northern Michigan winters without some serious triage. At the time, both buildings were owned by a local resort, whose owner had purchased them in the 1980s to use as headquarters for a golf course he’d wanted to build along the river. The golf course never materialized, so the mill was used for storage. Not long after he’d moved to Glen Arbor, Booth ran into the mill’s owner and asked him what his plans were for it. “He said, ‘Why, do you want to buy it?’ And that made me think maybe I do,” Booth recalls. Booth toured the building in photos by Andy Wakeman the late summer of 2018—a season when the Crystal River is at its zenith with huge salmon finning in from the depths of Lake Michigan to spawn under banks tangled with water lilies, wild blueberries, deep-green ferns and red cardinal flowers. By contrast, the mill was a gloomy mess—packed as it was nearly top to bottom with golf carts, snowmobiles, old furniture and “boxes stacked on top of boxes,” Booth says. Some shoving, moving and nosing around, however, revealed much more: the mill’s ancient equipment was all intact—73 years after the last Glen Arbor miller, August Brammer, locked the door and shuttered his business in 1945. In the cavernous great room with its pine paneling, oak trusses, posts and beams, Booth uncovered four milling machines: The two oldest—at least one dating back to the 1860s—were grist mills, their old stones
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