From The Connecticut River Valley in Southern Vermont and New Hampshire: Historical Sketches by Lyman S. Hayes, Tuttle Co., Marble City Press, Rutland, VT., 1929, page 315:
LINSEED OIL MANUFACTURED IN BELLOWS FALLS A CENTURY AGO
Among the mills using water from the Bellows Falls canal previous to a century ago was one for the manuufacture of a product, the process of manufacture of which few New England people of today know the primitive method. This is the manufacture of linseed oil, and its by-product of oil meal, extensively used early in the last century for feeding cattle.
Among the very first mills to be erected at Bellows Falls, previous to 1824, was an oil mill, for the making of pure linseed oil from flax seed. It stood nearly where the former machine room of the Babbit-Kelley Company, Inc., stood, just south of the buildings of the new hydrooelectric power development that is to use practically all the power of the Connecticut river.
The flax seed was poured upon a large stone floor, on which two immense stones like gristmill stones set on edge, were made to revolve around an upright shaft, like wagon wheels turning in a circle, thus crushing the seed. It then was shoveled into a large barrel of iron, about six feet long, made to revolve over a wood fire in a fireplace or arch, which used wood as long as the barrel was. After it was thoroughly cooked it was transferred into smaller very strong iron barrels, which had one movable head, and these were in turn put into a large log hollowed out with solid ends. Two of these strong barrels were used at a time, one placed at each end of the hollowed-out log. A press was set in motion, with cog wheels and screw, forcing the movable heads of each barrel inward and the oil flowed out of [316] the hollow log into receptacles to be shipped to the market. The cakes of oil meal resulting from the great pressure given them were then ground up and sold for cattle feed, while the oil was used in painting, as it is today. Its manufacture now is brought about by much more modern machinery than that of a century ago. A very few of the older inhabitants of this section of New England remember similar mills in different localities, but they all disappeared more than a half century ago.