Outdoors, Travel

Bollinger Mill State Historic Site

November 15, 2023

Bollinger Mill and Burfordville Covered Bridge provide you with a step back in time to experience genuine grist milling, a stroll through the oldest covered bridge in Missouri, and a peaceful rest along a tree-lined stream.

Surviving nineteenth-century mills and covered bridges are rare, and even rarer side by side. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy of Jim Diaz

THE BURFORDVILLE BRIDGE spans the Whitewater River just upstream from Bollinger Mill in an area that was a wilderness in the 1790s when George Bollinger arrived.

Bollinger received a Spanish land grant on condition that the land be developed and settled. He built the first mill and dam of logs at the turn of the nineteenth century, and he also brought twenty German and Swiss families from his home state of North Carolina to the settlement along with German-speaking slaves of their households. Bollinger would go on to serve as an officer in the War of 1812 and a statesman.

After Bollinger died in 1842, his family operated the mill until September 1861, when it was razed by Union troops in retaliation for an attack carried out by one of Bollinger’s confederate grandsons.

Visitors can inspect this Leffel turbine, like the one submerged in the river that ran the mill and still turns the stones today to grind cornmeal.
Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy of Denise H. Vaughn

In 1865, Solomon R. Burford rebuilt the mill, the four-story structure full of milling machines that visitors enjoy touring today. The mill ceased commercial operation around 1948, but its machinery has been painstakingly restored for demonstrations.