WILLOW CREEK — Willow Creek Custom Flooring, the town’s oldest continuously operating business, will begin offering guided tours of its historic mill facility starting next week, giving visitors a look inside a working hardwood flooring operation that dates to 1903.
General Manager Stu Peller said the tours grew out of requests from Dry Dock diners who wandered across the street after dinner and asked to see the machinery they had heard about from Dean Moreau’s history talk in the Lydia Barnes Room.
“People kept knocking on the door at 7 p.m. wanting to see the planer,” Peller said. “I figured I might as well formalize it before somebody gets hurt climbing over a stack of quarter-sawn oak.”
The 45-minute tour covers the full production line, from log breakdown to finished flooring, and includes the original 1903 steam-powered planer that Peller keeps on display in the front office. The machine, powered by a belt driven from the mill race, was still in regular use until 1987.
Visitors also see the original mill foundation, the river-water channel used for cooling, and a plaque commemorating the 1972 closure and 1990 reopening.
Tours will be offered Saturdays at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. through November, then resume in the spring. Admission is $5 per person, with proceeds going to the Willow Creek Historical Society.
Peller, who started at the mill sweeping floors in 1989, leads the tours himself.
“I’ve been here longer than anybody,” he said. “If they’re going to see the mill, they should hear it from somebody who knows where every scratch came from.”