HOOK MILL REDUX: IT GETS THE SHAFT

With three historic windmills in East Hampton Village all under repair at the same time, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. was forced this year to set some priorities.

The Mayor put Hook Mill, the most visible of the three, first. In December, when village employees were stringing Christmas lights on the mill's sails, they discovered rainwater had accumulated in one spot and the wood there was rotting. At the same time, a search was on for a massive white pine big enough to make a new shaft for the Gardiner Mill on James Lane, where a $360,000 restoration had been under way for about a year.

When one was found in Ohio, the Mayor asked that it be put in Hook Mill instead. Robert Hefner, the village's historic-preservation consultant, said the shaft is nearly completed and could be installed before Memorial Day, just in time for the summer season and many of the events connected with the town's 350th anniversary celebration.

If, that is, the helicopters are successful. Choppers have been searching old forests in Washington State for six venerable Douglas firs tall enough to make new stocks for all three mills (the Pantigo mill on Mill Hill Lane is the third) so the sails can turn.

The Pantigo Mill's stocks - the arms that connect the sails to the shaft - cracked in a storm two years ago. Hook Mill's were found cracked during the December inspection, though its sails are in fine shape, said Mr. Hefner.

"We tried to find black locust and even teak or some other tropical hardwood, but such large pieces of timber are getting more and more difficult to find," he said. "Through normal channels, you don't get much quality control." Instead, the village hired a small Washington timber company that selectively harvests old trees, specifically for special and unusual orders.

Once the firs arrive and are turned into stocks, assembling the works at Hook Mill will take just a day or two. Richard Ward Baxter of Amagansett is the general contractor on the Gardiner Mill restoration and is working with Sherrill Dayton on the new Hook Mill shaft, which still needs its neck irons and a tail gudgeon, a sort of axle.

The shaft found rotted in December was made in 1984 of white oak, which is softer than Douglas fir. Early mill shafts were made of black locust and were replaced every 25 years or so, each new one of a simpler design than its predecessor. Sometime around 1860, said Mr. Hefner, black locust became scarce and white oak was used instead.

Hook Mill's new shaft was 24 feet long when it arrived - it is now 18 feet - and workers counted 260 rings before the rings became indistinguishable.

Sherrill Dayton is also rebuilding the mill's sails, which turn the shaft. Village officials are hoping the mill will be fully functional for a demonstration this summer.

In days gone by, Hook Mill ground corn into meal and wheat into flour, but the last time the sails turned was on a breezy day in the early 1980s, when the Public Broadcasting System asked to use the mill in a documentary about the Dutch who settled the Hudson River Valley.

Mr. Hefner tried to design the Hook and Gardiner shafts as they were before they became museums, but had little to go on - just the jury-rigged shaft of the mill on Gardiner's Island and an 1890 drawing made by the seventh Nathaniel Dominy for an unknown windmill.

"Using that information and whatever I've learned looking at windmills and thinking about them, I tried to design the shafts more like they were in the 19th century," said the preservationist.

JULIA C. MEAD