The grain gathers us together: Barker's Creek Grist Mill.

Like many old-fashioned things, the process is slower, but the product is sweeter. "My grits aren't like the ones that people are used to buying at stores," cautions Woody Malot. "They take a while to cook. And that cornmeal, it doesn't have any preservatives in it; you can't just keep it on your shelf. I tell folks to keep it in the freezer, but it's really best to just use it right away."

The corn passes between the two millstones cup by cup, spilling fine white meal into a sparkling mound that grows slowly in the old wooden catch-box, until Woody scoops it up and deposits into a bag to be weighed and sold. The corn is still cool when it is packaged, one of the benefits of the slow process: "Other corn meals, that aren't ground this way, practically get cooked as they're ground. They're heated up so much that you lose a lot of nutrients that way, and a lot of the flavor of the corn." At the Barker's Creek Mill, the entire kernel passes through the millstones and is sealed in the bag; nothing is removed or separated out from the meal as it is ground. The fiber as well as the starch, and the nutrients from every part of the corn, are preserved.

There was a time when this mill wasn't so extraordinary. There used to be three just like it, just in the distance that it lies from Franklin, N.C., mere miles over the North Carolina line from these north Georgia mountains. Each rural county in the South held dozens of mills. The mill served as a community gathering place then, as it still does now in Rabun County. Every family would bring the corn that they had grown to the mill to be ground, and the miller would keep a small portion of the toll. Children who walked from their home in the Betty's Creek valley would drop off the family's corn at the mill on their way to school in Dillard, and pick up the ground meal on their way home. "It was really an old man's job to run the mill," Woody explains. "A man who couldn't work in the fields anymore could work at the mill--it was all part of the agricultural economy."

Rabun County itself has lots more in common with Western North Carolina and Macon County than with the rest of Georgia. It has historically been very isolated, with only one road going east to west and one road north to south. River borders on two sides made it very hard to get in or out of the county. There was no industry in the county, until the late 1960s--only people working to harvest farms and forests. So the mills in the area were active and held the same role from the time of settlement to the late 60s when people left the farms to work in the new plant. With the arrival of industry and the decline of local small-scale and subsistence farming, the mills disappeared one by one.

Barker's Creek Mill is owned by the Hambidge Center, an artist's retreat. They keep the mill here to support local farmers, but they don't do much with it--mill operator Woody Malot maintains the equipment, runs the mill, buys grain from the farmers, and markets the product to grocery stores in Clayton and Highlands, to the nearby Piggly Wiggly, at the Osage Farmer's Market, and mostly by word of mouth to interested customers.

On weekdays, Woody works as a physics teacher at Rabun Gap Nacoochee School, and he often brings his students out to the mill to work on the equipment or just to hear their lessons outdoors.

About three-quarters of what's ground at Barker's Creek is white corn meal and grits. Modern food scientists have made grits white by processing corn to death, and as a result most natural foods buyers look for yellow grits and cornmeal as a sign of a heartier and healthier product. But in the South, grits have traditionally always been white, not because of overprocessing but because the whole grain they come from is white corn. Barker's Creek Mill uses Keener's Corn, an open-pollinated white flint corn grown by the Keener family in Betty's Valley since the 1820s. This exact strain of corn may exist nowhere else. Bill Keener sells a truckload of the dry white corn kernels to the mill when Woody Malot needs it.

Woody also grinds Legg's prolific corn, from the Legg family in Jefferson, Georgia; blue corn from the pueblos in New Mexico; buckwheat from small farmers in Pennsylvania; and wheat. He also does what keeps him motivated and interested in the job--serves local families by grinding their grain for sale and for their own use. He keeps one-fourth of the grain he grinds as the miller's toll. This is the way it has always been done.

Rabun County is growing quickly because route 441 runs through it from Atlanta and Florida to the casino in Cherokee; land prices are escalating.

Woody sees a few tourists at the mill in the fall, but not very many. What this mill is to him is a really good spot to come and learn the stories of the old timers, and for him to sit and look at the mountains. "It pays for itself, and that's all I can ask," he says.

Find out how to mail order Barker's Creek Mill products at www.barkersmill.netfirms.com/.

Ginger Kowal is a volunteer with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project and a biology major at UNCA.

Peter Marks is Local Food and Farm Coordinator for Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP). ASAP's Local Food Guide is available in area retailers or online at www.appalachiangrown.org.