MARSLILL — A Mars Hill man has made fans around the world with videos he makes of his flour milling operation from his home on Metcalf Creek Loop Road. Justin Metcalf and his church are delivering food to rural West Virginia families and winning the hearts of hundreds of Southern Appalachian residents.
On May 18, Metcalf led members of California Creek Baptist Church to a remote area outside Panther, West Virginia, where residents were facing food shortages and the nearest food store was about a 90-minute drive away.
“This is somewhere south of Wells, West Virginia, deep in the mountains, right between Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia,” Metcalf said. “The mines closed, everybody who could move out moved out, and they were all left there with nothing to eat and no jobs.”
When Metcalf heard that members of California Creek Baptist Church were heading to West Virginia on a mission trip, he realized the trip aligned perfectly with his own mission: to help Appalachian communities by bringing back healthy food and restoring the sense of community that the local grain mills provided.
Metcalf is building another flour mill that he helped supply to residents of West Virginia, from which he plans to teach them how to grow their own food.
The mill is part of Metcalfe’s “Grain Mills for the Community” project.
“We’re going to be hauling a ton of corn and grinding it into cornmeal and grits,” Metcalf said before leaving. “The first week we decided to build the mill was in late January.”
Now, he said, he’s back at the factory full time, has bought three-phase motors to run other plants and is as energetic as ever.
“I’m excited about it. This is my first time using an electric motor and I can set exactly the speed I want. It’s really efficient,” Metcalfe said.
Metcalf also works to help other millers rebuild their mills and has met with millers from all over the country, including Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.
To source crops for milling, Metcalf found a man named Sammy Phillips from Boonville, Yadkin County, who was 95 years old at the time of the meeting and showed Metcalf up and down the stairs of the three-story mill.
In 2021 and 2022, he set up a YouTube page where he uploaded videos talking about the flour mill and received comments from residents around the world praising him for educating them about the history of the flour mill and community flour mills.
“Back in the day, every community had a flour mill,” Metcalf said, “and people couldn’t travel far and run to the grocery store in town to buy those products. If you lived in town, you might have been able to get those things, but your town probably still had a flour mill.”
“As things became more centralized and commercialized, flour mills went into decline because they replaced commercial products that were ground in some big commercial facility. It became easier to go to the store and buy a bag of flour or corn mill. That was the beginning of the decline of local flour mills.”
As a result, some of the healthiest ingredients in food have been removed from products in order to keep them on the shelves longer, so there are health benefits to using grain mills, Metcalfe reminds viewers.
“With wheat, they’ve just taken out the endosperm, which is the largest part of the wheat,” Metcalf says, “and all the bran and other parts that contain the nutritious fiber have been removed and separated. So when you go back to the community mill, you’re eating whole grain, which is what’s best for us: fresh, stone-ground whole grain.”
“I’ve had a lot of people say to me, ‘Justin, why don’t you just go to the store and buy a loaf of bread?’ But that’s because they’ve never tasted what bread made from freshly milled grains tastes like. This commercial food has taken people off the path of knowing what good food is. If you know what good food is, it’s well worth the time and effort to get it.”
Metcalf’s YouTube page, “Metcalf Mills of Appalachia,” has more than 16,000 followers.
“Their lives are going to change more than I ever imagined,” Metcalf said of the Panther plant, “and some of them still live in homes with dirt floors and no running water.”
Metcalfe said the area was flooded several years ago and local water sources are now contaminated by coal from the mine.
“The water there is polluted with sulfur. The average life expectancy is only 54 years,” Metcalf said, adding that he and a group from his church brought a water purification system to the West Virginia town on May 18.
According to healthdata.org, the life expectancy for men in McDowell County, West Virginia, where Panther is located, is 63.5 years, well below the national average of 76.5 years. The life expectancy for women in McDowell County is 71.5 years, compared to the national average of 81.2 years.
But the flour mill for West Virginia residents is just the first of many in the Grain Mill for Communities project, Metcalf said.
“When I started this project, I had no idea what a blessing it would be and what it would mean to the community,” he said. “I had hopes and dreams, but I’m amazed at how it’s gone.”
Family Traditions
Building and using mills was a family tradition for the Metcalf men.
“When I was a kid, my father would tell me stories about going to the mill on Saturdays with my grandfather and his brother, Elmer. My grandfather ran a small local mill and would grind people’s corn on Saturdays,” Metcalf said.
“My dad was a little boy, about 8 years old, and they were grinding flour, and he said he would stick his hand under the spout and the flour would come out of it, and the flour that came out of the stone was warm and hot,” he said.
“He said he would eat it out of his hand and told me how delicious it was, and he got me interested in it and it worked its way into my thinking.”
Years later, after caring for her ailing parents until their deaths last year, Metcalf found her calling again.
“I was trying to get everything ready and then my parents got sick and I couldn’t do it,” Metcalf said. “I had to stay home. I tried to come here and work, but after a while my dad would call and say he needed something. And I finally said, ‘I can’t do both. I have to stay here and take care of my parents,’ and that’s what I did.”
The Importance of Community
Human connection was a big motivation for Metcalf in this project because factories tend to bring communities together in a time of widespread distraction and disconnection, he said.
Metcalf first met with West Virginians in January and soon returned to his home state to work at a flour mill in the Panther community.
There may have been an element of “twist of fate” in Metcalf’s story about meeting the Panther residents.
The day before the January trip, one of Metcalf’s friends in California Creek suggested he travel with the team to West Virginia, since Metcalf had just split up with his girlfriend the day before.
“If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have gone on that trip,” Metcalf said. “We have to keep going. Hard things are going to happen to us, but we just have to persevere.”
Metcalf is no stranger to grief, and it’s what drives him to give back to others and honour loved ones and friends.
“The hardest thing that’s ever happened to me was when my parents died,” he said. “I lost my brother to a heart attack in 2008. He was 19 when I was born so he was like a second father to me because my dad was sick. My brother and I were very close. He died of a heart attack on my mother’s birthday.”
Metcalf’s homemade flour mill grinds corn into cornmeal and wheat for a healthy diet that could potentially feed more than 600 people living in remote areas of West Virginia.
“If we get a ton of corn in there, we have about five pounds of corn meal for each family to eat for a week,” Metcalf said. “We’re trying to figure out how to do it sustainably.”
During his visit to West Virginia, Metcalf met two residents, Ernest “Little Man” Blankenship and Eric Blankenship. “Little Man” had lived in the area his whole life and donated the old library to the grain mill to help feed the community.
Mr Metcalf said he would train the pair as millers and they would mill grain for the community, and the impact would be felt immediately.
“The day we delivered the mill, Eric was the happiest I’d ever seen him,” Metcalf said.
In many ways, the feeling is mutual, with the West Virginia community helping to bring even more joy to Metcalf.
“Right after my parents died, I got really down and depressed and just couldn’t do all the things I needed to do,” Metcalf said. “I was trying to continue working and raise my two daughters, and it just wasn’t possible. It wasn’t the right time, until I enrolled in school in West Virginia.”
“If I was going to build a mill just to sell and have a lot of people’s support and help, it didn’t seem right. I wanted to give back in some way. When I went to school in West Virginia, I knew this was a way for me to give back. These people need this.”
