Tanner's Mill

Tanner's Mill is a rural industrial complex on Walnut Creek, a fork of the Middle Oconee River, in Hall County, Georgia. It grew from the 1830s into the early twentieth century under the Tanner family. The centerpiece is a three-story, clapboard grist and flour mill dating from 1886, still holding much of its milling equipment, including granite and European quartzite stones and a breastshot waterwheel more than twenty feet across. Nearby are a water-powered cotton gin built in the 1830s, the ruins of the Walnut Factory wool mill, a wooden dam, a 1914 iron truss bridge, the Tanner house, a miller's house built in 1895, and a barn. At its peak the mill ground over 12,000 bushels a year and served Hall and neighboring counties. Flood damage in 1961 ended operations. The complex is valued as a surviving record of Georgia's rural mill industry, with further archaeological potential.