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The History of Advance Mills Virginia

Advance Mills grew up around the Fray family gristmilling operations established on the north fork of the Rivanna River in 1833.

The community was known as Fray's Mill until 1888 when a post office was established at this location and the name changed to Advance Mills.

Tradition says the name was proposed by a Fray family member who admired all the "advances" happening in the commumty.

EARLY SETTLEMENT (1607-1750)

European settlement of this section of Albemarle County did not begin until the 1730s.

At that time, the northern section of the county, which includes Advance Mills, was a part of Hanover County.

This part of the county was settled predominantly by immigrants from the York River counties of Virginia.

Early patents in the general vicinity included one in 1735 by John Henry, father of Patrick Henry, who owned 1,250 acres to the southwest of the Advance Mills area between Earlysville and Free Union (Woods 1907: 5).

After 1742, this became part of Louisa County.

Albemarle County was founded in 1744 and this part of Louisa County was added to Albemarle County in 1761.

As early as 1745, a road running as far west as today's village of Advance Mills was established along the approximate route of State Route 641, which intersects with Coursey's Road (State Route 20), leading northeast to Orange Court House, and the Fredericksburg Road (State Route 22), even farther to the east (Pawlett 1983: 3-4).

The need for a road in this area suggests that there were a number of settlers in the Advance Mills area at a relatively early date in Albemarle County's history.

Most of these settlers became farmers, growing mainly tobacco and relying on both the river and the crude tobacco-rolling roads for transporting their products to market.

Towns and population centers were few, and settlement was widely scattered during this period.

COLONY TO NATION (1750-1789)

Northern Albemarle County's economy continued to be marked by agricultural pursuits throughout the colonial and early Republic periods, although farmers gradually shifted from tobacco to cereal grain production as the eighteenth century ended.

This emphasis on grain agriculture had the effect of creating a demand for both trading centers and grist mills, particularly along streams and rivers.

Some of Albemarle County's earliest mills date from this period, reflecting this important change in the county's agriculture.

EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD (1789-1830)

The period from the end of the Revolutionary War into the early part of the nineteenth century was characterized, in this area, by the continued shift away from tobacco and the almost exclusive reliance on grain as a cash crop.

The economic advantages of grain made it possible for local farmers to improve their farms and buildings.

A number of surviving farm houses from this era exist in the surrounding area.

However, the farmers were somewhat hampered in their efforts to improve their cash position because of the lack of mills in the area.

ANTEBELLUM PERIOD (1830-1860)

Advance Mills is one of Albemarle County's most recognizable milling communities and contains resources dating back to the early 1800s.

The Fray family dominated the history of the Advance Mills community.

Town founder John Fray operated a flour mill at this location beginning in 1833. For more than fifty years the village was known as Fray's Mill.

The name was changed to Advance Mills in 1888 by the U.S. Post Office.

The Fray family, of German ancestry, descended from a John Fray who had settled in Culpeper County by the early 1760s.

They were presumably part of the larger migration of German settlers moving east from the Shenandoah Valley in the eighteenth century. J

ohn Fray's son, Ephraim Fray, built a mill in 1799 on Deep Run in Madison County (later known as Crigler's Mill), which Ephraim sold in 1810 to his son, John Fray.

In 1833, the younger John Fray sold that mill and moved his wife and seven children to his newly bought property in Albemarle County, where he and his teenaged sons constructed a flour mill on the north fork of the Rivanna River.

Grist milling was a profitable enterprise during this period, as Albemarle County farmers made the transition from growing tobacco to growing cereal grains.

Over the next several years, Fray bought and sold almost 1,000 acres of land in northern Albemarle County.

The Fray family occupied a still-existing house beside the river, now called Holly Tree Farm.

A portion of this house may date to about 1790, although it has been added onto numerous times during its history.

It is a typical Federal period house with finely detailed brickwork and some original fireplace mantels.

A collection of nineteenth-century outbuildings remains on this property.

These outbuildings include an ice house, kitchen, smokehouse, several sheds, and a barn.

The house and its outbuildings are significant for their association with the Fray family, as well as for the wide variety of building types and functions they represent.

 CIVIL WAR (1861-1865)

Comparatively little military activity occurred in Albemarle County during the Civil War, and unlike much of the rest of Virginia, most of the county's farms and towns were spared.

No military activity occurred in or around Advance Mills and the Fray family mills apparently continued to operate throughout the war years.

RECONSTRUCTION AND GROWTH (1865-1914)

Little information on Fray's Mill and the size and makeup of the surrounding community is contained in gazetteers and business listings from the antebellum period.

However, the mill and the surrounding community are shown on a number of historic maps of Albemarle County published during and after the Civil War.

The earliest known map of Albemarle County, the Gilmer map of 1864, shows two mills marked "Frays" on the Rivanna River, as well as farms in the surrounding area owned by "Mrs. Fray," B. Creel, Scribner and F. Marshall.

The Hotchkiss map of Albemarle County of 1866 shows "Frey's Mill" and the same nearby farms.

So, too,, does the Peyton map of Albemarle County of 1875, although by this time the Marshall farm is marked "Marshall's Distillery," and a Garrett family has joined the neighborhood.

The Fray family continued to dominate the economic and commercial life of the small Fray's Mill community and surrounding farms for several years.

Other towns and villages from this period in Albemarle County, such as Batesville and Crozet, supported a number of competing stores and businesses.

Fray's Mill, bypassed by the railroad and serving only the immediate farm community, remained something of a backwater and did not grow substantially beyond a small collection of houses and businesses, all owned by members of the Fray family.

The family of Albert Garriot Fray, John Fray's youngest son, continued to develop the family enterprises at Advance Mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Albert Garriot Fray had three sons: John Milton Fray, Robert Briggs Fray and Aubrey Gaines Fray.

John Milton Fray and Aubrey Gaines Fray joined with their father in the milling and mercantile business and Robert Fray developed a substantial farming operation in the Advance Mills area, raising sheep, cattle, wheat and corn.

John Milton Fray became a leading citizen of Albemarle, serving 35 years on the Board of Supervisors from 1908 until his death in 1943, and part of that time as the Board's chairman.

In the 1880s, the mill complex owned by the Frays and mill operations conducted by others produced not only flour and cornmeal but also wool.

In size and scale of operations, it was comparable to several other mills from this period in Albemarle County and Charlottesville.

In gazetteers beginning in 1884, the community is first represented only in listings for the A. G. Fray mill appearing under corn & flour mills and the Albert G. Fray mill under woolen mills.

Both of these were listed as being in Earlysville, the nearest post office, although this community is three miles away.

In 1884 the firm of J. M. Fray & Co. was established by John Milton Fray and Aubrey Gaines Fray, sons of Albert Garriot Fray, and grandsons of the John Fray who established the first mill.

This enterprise included a large general store, managed by A. Gaines Fray and the mills, under John M. Fray's direction.

Advance Mills first appeared under that name in a gazetteer of 1888.

It had become a post office by this time, and tradition has it that the name Advance Mills was proposed by John Fray, who claimed that people frequently commented about all the "advances" being made there.

The post office, housed in the general store, gave new importance to both the Advance Mills community, and the Fray family, who served as postmasters for a number of years.

In 1888, listings in Chataigne's gazetteer for Advance Mills included the Fray corn and flour mill, two saw mills, two "carpenters who are also contractors," one general merchant (J. M. Fray), one millwright, and one tanner.

The A. G. Fray mill continued to be listed in Earlysville under woolen mills and A. G. Fray also appeared listed in that community as a wool dealer.

This was likely a holdover from earlier directories, and actually referred to the Fray mill complex at Advance Mills.

Other directories in the next decade listed the same businesses and' artisans, with the addition of a saddle-and-harnessmaker, a cattle dealer, an agricultural implements dealer, and distiller.

Around the turn of the century two frame houses with identical floor plans were built in the village to serve as the Fray general store merchant's house (VDHR #02-2159) and the Fray Mill miller's house (VDHR #02-2165) (Figure 6.2).

The foundations of the miller's house are part of an older ice house (Ballard interview 2/16/95).

According to Greene County native Cecil Wetsel, Gaines Fray lived in the merchant's house before he built his larger brick house on Route 743 north of the river, now called Sunny Bank, around 1905.

This handsome Colonial Revival-style house is in virtually unaltered condition and is an excellent example of domestic architecture from this period.

The size and scale of this house are a further indication of the social and economic prominence of the Fray family in Advance Mills.

John M. Fray's oldest son, Albert, served as a clerk in the general store and also lived in the store merchant's house at one time.

By 1906, J. M. Fray & Co. was described as "dealers in general merchandise, millers and undertakers."

The two mills included one for grinding flour, cornmeal and feeds and another for grinding sumac, used in dying cloth.

The flour mill produced 30 barrels a day using "the very latest Wolf Gyrator system" of machinery and the store served customers throughout northern Albemarle and southern Greene Counties.

The store was evidently a very substantial operation; a 1912 advertising broadside proclaimed that ten clerks were on hand at all times to assist customers.

The 1907 Massie map of Albemarle County showed the community had a telephone as well as a post office.

Along with nearby Earlysville, it was the most important community in this part of Albemarle County.

Although there are no churches located in Advance Mills, the wider community at that time contained two grade schools, one for black and one'for white students.

Colored School No. 7 was just east of the village on Route 641 while White School No. 21 was north of the village on Route 743. Neither building is known to still exist.

As roads improved during the early and mid twentieth century, the need for a structurally sound bridge crossing over the Rivanna River at Advance Mills became more important.

The date of the first bridge at Advance Mills is unknown.

The Episcopalian Archdeacon Frederick Neve described in his memoirs crossing the Advance Mills bridge during a flood in the first decade of the twentieth century.

He described the bridge as a plank bridge with no sides.

 WORLD WAR I TO WORLD WAR II (1914-1945)

By 1932, Route 29 (contiguous with then-State Route 28) ran from Earlysville through the center of Advance Mills along present Route 743.

The present bridge is a nineteenth-century structure moved to this location in 1943 after an earlier wooden bridge had been washed out by a flood.

The bridge is a two-span steel structure with one pony truss and one Pratt through truss supported on a concrete substructure.

These trusses were relocated from an unknown site.

This bridge is one of a small number of Pratt trusses still standing in Albemarle County and is an essential element in the historic character of the Advance Mills community.

Mrs. Frances Fray Ballard, born in 1927 in Advance Mills and the granddaughter of Robert Briggs Fray, remembered that during her childhood the Fray family mill was producing flour, cornmeal and animal feeds, although saw-milling had ceased by that time.

The J. M. Fray & Co. store was one of the largest general stores in Albemarle County in the first half of the twentieth century, and like most general stores, it carried a broad array of goods.

Residents from the surrounding area sold their bought sumac, ginseng, and animal hides to the Frays as middlemen.

Sumac was often stored near the store for later sale; there was once a sumac house in the field across Route 743 from the store.

Clothes were also sold in the general store.

An addition was made to the store in the early 1900s and men's suits were added.

There was also a millinery department, and the store dealt in caskets and had a horse-drawn hearse.

Grist mills, such as the Fray family mill, were once a common sight throughout Albemarle County and were an integral part of the county's agricultural economy.

Before World War II, Cecil Wetsel, raised in nearby Greene County, remembered going to Advance Mills on many occasions with his father to deliver grain from his family's wheat farm for grinding.

Farmers often stored their wheat here while waiting for it to be ground.

According to Wetsel, the store paid a penny a pound for sumac (which had to be dry and bagged in burlap), but would pay a half cent more if the seller would take store coupons (good for J. M. Fray merchandise) instead of cash.

Burnley's was the closest railroad stop and "fancy" goods for the store were shipped in by rail and brought by wagon from Burnley Station.

 MODERN PERIOD (1945-PRESENT)

J. M. Fray & Co. continued both milling and retail operations until fire destroyed the store in 1946. The mill burned on March 15, 1948.

A diesel engine installed in the mill to supplement water power ignited the fire.

The Fray Mill joined the ranks of numerous other grist mills in Albemarle County that succumbed to fire, flood, and economic hard times during the mid twentieth century.

(There are no longer any operating mills in the county).

Following the mill fire, the sites of both the store and mill were effectively leveled and the turbines were removed from concrete supports and left to rust.

The foundations of both the mill and the store still remain as visible reminders of these once-important business operations.

Mrs. Ballard's husband, Ray Ballard, bought the burned out complex at auction for $2,000 in 1948 and shortly thereafter built the existing cinder block store in which the Ballards opened Advance Mills Supply around 1950.

A retired engineer, C. H. Atkins, bought the old Fray farm (Holly Tree Farm) and mill site in 1967.

In 1984 he put the remains of the existing dam to use by installing two turbines to generate electricity for his own home and up to fifty others.

Remains of both the original mill dam, mill race, and the mill site can be seen on the east bank of the Rivanna River, south of the metal truss bridge.

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