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By Jon Fear, Record Staff
Long before Twitter and long before e-cards, people used postcards to send a quick note to friends and relatives. You could buy them ready to be mailed, as you still can today, but many people also had postcards privately printed using photos they had taken themselves.
Our May 29 mystery photo was one of these private postcards - an image snapped in 1912 showing the Menno Snider mill in the village of Conestogo, just north of Waterloo in Woolwich Township.
The view looks west over the mill, which is still there today on the south side of Sawmill Road but much harder to see because of trees that have grown on the hillside. For the past four decdes it has been owned by W-S feed & Supplies Ltd., which also has plants in Mount Forest and Tavistock.
Accounts in several local histories indicate a flour mill was built on this site above the Conestogo River in the 1840s by David Musselman. he was also the founder of Conestogo, which was initially called Musselman's Mills.
In 1856 the mill operation was sold to the entrepreneurial Henry Snider, the first of four generations of Sniders who together were in charge of the business for almost 100 years.
Snider's father was Jacob Schneider, a farmer in the Bloomingdale area who had come north from Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. As the story goes the son opted to change the spelling of his last name when he married Elizabeth Snider so that their children would received an inheritance from their mother's father - a man who strongly preferred the Snider spelling of the orignal Schneider name.
After Henry died in 1885, his son Menno Snider operated the mill, rebuilding the main building with red brick following a major fire in 1904. His son, Walter J. Snider, became the owner in 1916.
Three years later he also acquired the flour mill in St. Jacobs and launched the Snider Flour Milling Company Ltd.
Ernest Hachborn, a retired engineer who lives in Conestogo, sent a note identifying the mill and dating the postcard image. He writes: "The large mill race which powered the two turbines is visible between the two structures, one (turbine) powering the chopping machinery to process farmer's grain into feed and the other powering the flour-making machinery." "Wheat for flour production was trucked from St. Jacobs, where it arrived by rail, and was discharged into a large hopper at the edge of Sawmill Road, then conveyed down the chute visible to the right of the elevator (the square structure on the right in the photo) for storage until processing." " The finished product was shipped out in large barrels, which were made a few doors up Sawmill Road at the cooperage operated by Jacob Cuntz. My father, Henry Hachborn, manufactured the replacement wooden cogs for the large gears that were part of the water power machinery, sometimes being assisted by his brother , William Hachborn, who was chief millwright at the St. Jacobs mill."
Jane Epp (Snider) of Waterloo also recognized the mill photo immediately. Menno Snider was her great, great grandfather, she writes in an emailed note. "To the far right side of the photo, you can see the old homestead where Menno and his wife, Harriettt Fields, raised three sons and four daughters...My dad, Clifford Snider, ran these mills for several years after Walter died."
Darrel Snider of Kitchener (no close relation fo the mill owners) says he and his twin brother Dale visited the mill often in the early 1950s, helping their father Harvey, who farmed east of the village. "I used to back up to the side door with the horses and wagon with grain to get chopped when I was about 12 or 14. Then we would go up to Stroh's store and buy a big bottle of pop."
For Eleanor Rau of Elmira, going to the mill with her father, Neslon Shelley, was a "little adventure" that she regularly enjoyed as a young girl. They would deliver oats and wheat for processing and pick up feed for chickens the family raised. On Saturdays her father would deliver eggs to customers in Kitchener and Waterloo.
Thanks to Rych Mills of Kitchener for providing the post card for this column. It's one of several he aquired from the family of the late Dorothy Russell of Kitchener, whose grandparents, Tobias and Mary Schantz, lived in Conestogo before moving to Berlin (now Kitchener) in 1883. Russell's son , Harold, says his great grandparents lived a short walk from the Snider mill, where Tobias was employed for about seven years before the move.
A short reference to Conestogo and the mill is wrote on the back of the postcard with the words "Dorothy & I were there several days," likely written by one of Dorothy Russell's relatives following a visit to the village.
