Mooresville has changed a lot over the years, but a few things have stayed right where they started. One of them sits at 448 North Main Street. Most people drive past it without a second thought, but that brick flour mill has been grinding grain for longer than almost any business in town. This year, the building itself turns 100 years old.

The story begins in the late 1890s, when the Melchor family opened a roller mill in a simple wooden frame building with a large oak tree in the front yard. The town’s own history lists the business as the “Big Oak Rolling Mill,” and I suspect that oak is where the name came from.

The location was no accident. The mill sat on the main stage road through Mooresville, a route that began as an old Indian trail, and it became a regular stopping point for stagecoaches. The Melchors even had their own water system. A windmill powered a well and water tank that pumped water to the mill and to the family’s home directly across the street. For a town that had only been chartered in 1873, that was cutting-edge stuff.

In 1914, the operation became a flour and feed mill serving farms across Iredell County. Ten years later, in 1924, disaster struck and the wooden building burned. Most businesses would have called it quits.

In 1926, a new brick building went up on the same spot. That’s the building you see today, and a century later it’s still doing exactly what it was built to do.

In 1928, the mill was sold to E. W. Brawley, W. N. Lentz, and Dr. A. E. Bell, who ran it for nearly 30 years. In 1955, Maiden Flour Mills of Newton bought the business, and it was later acquired by Bay State Milling, the current owner. Bay State is a five-generation, family-owned company out of Massachusetts, and its Mooresville plant still produces both organic and conventional wheat flour.