War Eagle Mill

Rebuilt three times after a flood, Confederate arson, and fire, War Eagle Mill now hosts a poltergeist in its third-floor Bean Palace restaurant that throws plates, launches tea dispenser lids across the room, and rearranges chairs nightly. A Confederate soldier walks the creek bank at dusk.

Lids fly off the tea dispensers and sail across the Bean Palace restaurant on the third floor. Chairs found in different positions every morning than where staff left them the night before. Kitchen sounds from the cooking area when it's dark, locked, and empty. The poltergeist at War Eagle Mill puts in a full shift after closing, and paranormal researchers who've investigated the site confirm something is up there.

Sylvanus and Catherine Blackburn settled in the War Eagle Valley in 1832 and built a water-powered gristmill beside War Eagle Creek, one of the earliest milling operations in northwest Arkansas. They raised a homestead with a distinctive stone chimney that still stands. In 1848, a flood swept the mill into the river. They rebuilt, adding a sawmill by around 1860.

The Civil War took the second one. The Fourth Iowa Regiment under Colonel Grenville Dodge occupied the site. After Union forces departed in March 1862, Confederate soldiers arrived and burned the mill to keep it out of Federal hands. General Earl Van Dorn's retreating army had already passed through the valley following his defeat at the Battle of Pea Ridge. When the war ended, the Blackburns came home to find only their house still standing. James Austin Cameron Blackburn, Sylvanus's son, rebuilt the mill by 1873. It burned again in 1924.

The property sat dormant for nearly fifty years. In 1973, Jewel Medlin purchased it. His wife Leta and daughter Zoe Medlin Caywood found the original blueprints and built a faithful replica of the 1873 structure. The fourth War Eagle Mill is now the only working gristmill in Arkansas and the only undershot water-powered mill operating in the United States, driven by an eighteen-foot cypress water wheel. The original ferry crossing was replaced with a 182-foot steel bridge in 1907 at a cost of ,790.

A Confederate soldier walks the banks of War Eagle Creek near the mill at dusk. He appears along the shoreline where his comrades burned the Blackburn mill over 160 years ago, a uniformed figure looking out at the water before fading. Visitors have spotted him across decades. Whether he was one of the soldiers who set the fire or someone who fell in the valley and stayed, nobody knows.

The third floor is where things get physical. The Bean Palace restaurant serves cornbread and beans ground from the working mill below, and something takes over the kitchen after hours. Plates have been thrown. Lids launch off tea dispensers and fly across the room. Voices and footsteps fill the second and third floors when no one is in the building. Items fall to the floor on their own. An older man with a long white beard has been seen roaming the mill grounds, separate from the Confederate soldier, though some visitors think they're the same figure.

War Eagle Mill is at 11045 War Eagle Road in Rogers. The mill still stone-grinds organic flours and cornmeal. The Bean Palace serves food on the third floor. The annual War Eagle Craft Fair fills the valley with thousands of visitors every October. The poltergeist works the overnight.