Dictionary

pecker mill en · NOUN

Etymology

pecker (“a mechanical device moving in a pecking fashion”) + mill

Meanings

1. (US, dialectal, historical) A kind of rice mill.
   • Rice mills, called pecker, cog, and water mills... The first... so called, from the pestle's striking... in the manner of a wood pecker. 1802, J. Drayton, A view of South Carolina, as respects her natural and civil concerns, section 121:
   • The first mechanical mills were harnessed to animals: the so-called pecker mill (named for the resemblance of the pestle when in action to the bill of a woodpecker) and the cog mill, a large horizontal cogwheel turned by oxen or horses. 2001, Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the ..., page 128:
   • John Drayton claimed in the early 18oos that the most common device was this "pecker" mill run by livestock 1996, Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, page 253:
   • The rice was then cut with the sickle and carried in on the head, then threshed with the flail, then milled and dressed, in some cases wholly by human labor, and in others by a rude machine, called a pecker mill. 1851, James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, Robert Gibbes Barnwell, Edwin Bell, De Bow's New Orleans Monthly Review, volume 11, page 307:
   • The pecker mill is likely the fulcrum device developed by Guerrard in 1691. 2003, Michael Trinkley, Debi Hacker, Sarah Fick, Liberty Hall: A Small Eighteenth Century Rice Plantation, page 30:
   • By the 1780s two types of mills were used that utilized animal power, those being the pecker mill and the cog mill. 1995, C. Wayne Smith, Crop Production: Evolution, History, and Technology, page 241:
   • the capacity of such a pecker mill was increased simply by mounting several in a row to be driven by a common shaft. 1991, Jeon Lee, The Historical Geography of Rice Culture in the American South:

Forms