The Dart: Waterwheel full of memories of Dad

Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007

By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer

GLEN ALPINE – There isn't a large river or stream anywhere near the 16-foot steel waterwheel standing alone in the middle of the McGalliard land.

Sure, there's a small creek a few dozen feet away, but the dirt peeks through the shallow puddles and halts any thought that this might be the tributary to spin the massive red wheel.

But James McGalliard wasn't worried about that two decades ago, when he built the wheel on a small portion of his family's nearly 50 acres. McGalliard, then 72, just liked building things and thinking about how man-crafted machines could coexist with nature.

"He loved water mills," said son David McGalliard. "He just loved nature and putting nature to use."

James McGalliard, 92, died a month ago, but the waterwheel still sits where The Dart recently landed - in the open field nestled at the end of Snowhill Place, just outside of Glen Alpine and surrounded by golden grasses, sloping hills and hundreds of trees.

His son, 67-year-old David McGalliard, said his father had never built a waterwheel before he started collecting the parts for this one in 1986. Still, McGalliard said, it's perfect.

"It's just so well-balanced, I've seen the wind turn it," he said.

James McGalliard wasn't a novice at building things.

Over the years, the Burke County native and 1938 Elon graduate and football player took a job at a shipyard, farmed dairy cows, ran a sawmill, built hundreds of machines - from garden tractors to trailers - and repaired countless planers and tools.

"He built a lot of stuff. Trailers for moving soilage and trailers with dumps on them - even before people thought of trailers with dumps on 'em," David McGalliard said. "He could fix anything except the break of day or a broken heart."

In 1965, James McGalliard bought an old sawmill in East Tennille, Ga., that had been empty for years, his son said, fixed the broken turbine, cleaned out the silt and started a business grinding corn and sawing wood.

"That sawmill was really cool," McGalliard recalled. "With the water power, all you could hear was the saw turning."

Maybe the memory of the saw is why James McGalliard decided to start building a water mill on his Burke County front lawn decades later. David McGalliard said his father had tentative plans to reroute water from a larger stream, dam it and hoist it over the wheel.

"He just dreamed about working. He wasn't into movies, and he didn't drink," McGalliard said. "He got up in the morning to work. That's what he did."

But when his father became ill about four years ago and was too weak to work, McGalliard asked what he should do with the wheel.

"I said, `Pops, I'm not sure I'm going to put that to use. What do you think if we found someone who could use it?' " McGalliard recalled. "He liked that."

McGalliard said he's still not sure what to do with the giant red wheel. He might try to finish the project and find a stream to churn the mill, but he likely will start taking bids on eBay. He wouldn't accept less than $5,000 for the work his dad put in, he said.

If the wheel doesn't bring in at least that much, he said, he'll let it stand in the middle of the field - a sort of garden sculpture memorial to his father.


The Point of The Dart

The idea behind The Dart is simple: We're looking for the kind of news the media don't usually report. We throw a dart at a map of one of the counties in the Catawba Valley, and we'll write about what's happening at that spot. We hope this feature will bring out stories that too often are ignored and will help you meet some of your neighbors in the region.


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