691 – Sawmill from Rafz ZH, 19th Century

The shell of the building comes from Rafz and was built onto the Untermühle grain mill, probably around 1841. It is a timber frame construction on a foundation of quarrystone. The drive power comes from an overshot water wheel: water flows in a flume to the top of the wheel, falls into the wooden buckets at the front and rotates the wheel.

Mechanical saws are known in the countryside since the waning middle ages, in the 15th century. Yet wood was often hewn by hand until the 19th century: with big carpenter’s adzes and axes, with handsaws and hatchets. Transport to and from the sawmill was often arduous or impossible. In the 19th century, the age of industrialisation, mechanical sawmills came into their own. Especially the type of single saw shown here was found in many regions.