Background Materials on Peveril Meigs Tide Mill Collection

Background on the Meigs Tide Mill Research Collection

BIOGRAPHY - Peveril Meigs (1903 – 1979) was an historical geographer whose professional life began in Baja California, where he focused on and wrote about arid landscape, early Dominican missions and native peoples of the area. After his retirement, he focused on tide mills, received a grant from the American Philosophical Society to study them from Nova Scotia to Georgia and planned to write a book about the subject, but died having penned only a few short articles. The bulk of his research papers and photographs make up this collection.

PROVENANCE – After Meigs’s death, his papers were gathered and boxed at his home in Maryland, under the guidance of his son Willard, who did some work on its New York mills and maps before moving with them to Lewisville, North Carolina [date?] where they were carefully stored until 2019.

About 1992 John Goff [associated later with TIDE MILL INSTITUTE (TMI)] became aware of the collection and for several years he and members of that organization corresponded intermittently with Willard in unsuccessful attempts to view and study the papers. In 2016 discussions began in earnest with Willard about their future.

In the meantime, Stephen Meigs, Peveril’s grandson, had begun sorting some of the papers and photographs, separating them from family photos. In September of 2019 Meigs graciously donated them to TMI who agreed to organize and transfer them to a suitable academic library archive.

THE COLLECTION - The collection contains a wide variety of information about tide mills gathered by Meigs during more than a decade of archival and library research and field work. It includes correspondence, data, maps, and photographs. It will be organized into five series. Series One contains articles written by Meigs about tide mills. Series Two contains material about specific tide mills, arranged geographically by location. Series Three consists of index card files of Meigs’s research notes, again arranged geographically. Series Four consists of field books describing Meigs’s various expeditions recording measurements of what he found, interviews with local contacts, sketch maps of mill sites and observations about the history of local mills. Series Five contains correspondence, clippings and other printed material about ocean energy, a wider Meigs interest.

SIGNIFICANCE – To survive and prosper, colonial communities needed mills to provide food and lumber. In coastal regions, tide mills became an important technological and cultural feature of life in the region as they were in Europe. But neither the history nor these aspects of American and Canadian tide mills have been studied as they have in Europe. The Meigs collection is the largest extant corpus of information about these mills. Its careful study and analysis by molinologists will now be possible.