Today, only the stone ruins remain as a reminder of this center of 18th & 19th century commerce. For nearly 200 years, a series of three flouring mills and four sawmills stood near the White House Bend of the Shenandoah River about three miles west of Luray. The first was built circa 1775 by David Kauffman, son of the Valley pioneer, Martin Kauffman I. This mill stood for nearly a century before b
eing burned by Union cavalry during the Civil War on October 2, 1864. After the war, a second mill quickly emerged from the ashes in 1866 only to be destroyed four years later by the Great Flood of 1870. The third and last mill was erected in 1871. It stood until the ravages of time and tides required its removal in 1972. It began, and it ended as “Kauffman’s Mill,” but along the way it was owned, either in whole
or in part, by the Kauffmans, the Rhoads, the Almonds, the Keysers, the Stricklers, the Maucks, and finally the Kauffmans once again. During the 19th century, the grand old mills served as a centerpiece of Massanutten commerce. Flour produced here was shipped downriver as far as Georgetown on long,
narrow flatboats called “gundalows.” From there, coastal schooners carried it to Richmond, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Flatboat commerce gave way to the railroads in the 1880s, after which much of the flour produced by Kauffman’s Mill was shipped to North Carolina to serve the lumber camps. Operations ceased when the turbine was destroyed by the “Great Saint Patrick’s Day Flood” of 1936.
