c. 1890 Letz Feed Mill Grinding Disk

 This grinding disk, sometimes called a buhr or millstone, was made sometime after its October 7, 1890 patent date by the Letz Manufacturing Company in Crown Point, Indiana. You can view the patent for this millstone as a pdf here.
 The Letz Manufacturing Company had a long history before the company produced Stuhr Museum's feed grinders and grinding disk. The company was founded by Louis Holland Letz, a German immigrant to the United States. Louis, the son of a German farm machinery builder in Steinbach, Hallenberg, Germany, first settled with his wife and three young children in Chicago, Illinois. Growing weary of the big city, Louis and his family moved to Crown Point, Indiana, in 1881, where he started the Crown Point Manufacturing Company. He soon began manufacturing his first feed mill.
 Spurred on by supporters, Letz entered his mills into several competitions, including the 1890 Paris Fair, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. He garnered awards and acclaim at these events, and his company slowly grew. Louis died in 1908, but his children, George, John, Otto, William, Ludwig, Eva, and Carol continued the business. George, John, and William published several patents for feed grinders and similar machinery during the 1910s to 1930s. The company closed it doors in 1965, after eight decades in the feed grinder business.
 Feed grinders first came on the scene by the 1860s, although many farmers did not have a horse treadmill to power them. By the early 1900s, however, as more and more farmers purchased not just horse treadmills but early gas engines like the examples here at Stuhr Museum, the feed grinder became very popular. The Letz Manufacturing Company was one of many companies developing very effective mills for grinding a wide variety of plants into feed. The four Letz grinders here at Stuhr Museum show part of the offerings farmers had to choose from as they considered how they were going to feed their cattle and pigs in the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1930s, the hammermill gradually replaced the feed grinder, or buhr mill, as the tool for preparing animal feed.

Farm Implements, vol. XXIX,
no. 9 (September 30, 1915).