pecker mill

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English

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Etymology

pecker (“a mechanical device moving in a pecking fashion”) + mill

Noun

pecker mill (plural pecker mills)

  1. (US dialectal, historical) A kind of rice mill.
    • 1802, J. Drayton, A view of South Carolina, as respects her natural and civil concerns, section 121:
      Rice mills, called pecker, cog, and water mills... The first... so called, from the pestle's striking... in the manner of a wood pecker.
    • 1851, James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, Robert Gibbes Barnwell, Edwin Bell, De Bow's New Orleans Monthly Review‎, volume 11, page 307:
      The rice was then cut with the sickle and carried in on the head, then threshed with the flail, then milled and dressed, in some cases wholly by human labor, and in others by a rude machine, called a pecker mill.
    • 1991, Jeon Lee, The Historical Geography of Rice Culture in the American South‎:
      the capacity of such a pecker mill was increased simply by mounting several in a row to be driven by a common shaft.
    • 1995, C. Wayne Smith, Crop Production: Evolution, History, and Technology‎, page 241:
      By the 1780s two types of mills were used that utilized animal power, those being the pecker mill and the cog mill.
    • 1996, Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815‎, page 253:
      John Drayton claimed in the early 18oos that the most common device was this "pecker" mill run by livestock
    • 2001, Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the ...‎, page 128:
      The first mechanical mills were harnessed to animals: the so-called pecker mill (named for the resemblance of the pestle when in action to the bill of a woodpecker) and the cog mill, a large horizontal cogwheel turned by oxen or horses.
    • 2003, Michael Trinkley, Debi Hacker, Sarah Fick, Liberty Hall: A Small Eighteenth Century Rice Plantation‎, page 30:
      The pecker mill is likely the fulcrum device developed by Guerrard in 1691.
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