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The Mill Office in Stanitsa Karghinskaya is Reconstructed

Early in the XX century, when building up the mill, simultaneously there was built an office for its management. Usually in the office there was a counterman’s desk with accounts, estimates and receipts on it. Depending on the production range of the mill the offices were built one- or two-storeyed.

Such a typical office, a house for the mill employees on the estate of T.A.Karghin in Stanitsa Karghinskaya, is a remaining monument of history and culture of the early XX century, now a site of the National M.A.Sholokhov Museum-Reserve. The building is a one-storey two-room wing in the Cossack style. Its wooden walls are clay covered and whitewashed, the roof is metal, painted, with planked pediments and a cornice, the windows have folding wooden, painted shutters with jambs and sandriks; at the end of the wooden boarded corridor, a wooden porch was built on.

The office for the employees consisted of two rooms and an attached north side wooden corridor. The first room was used as an office, where was a stove for heating the two rooms and cooking meals, the second room was a dwelling for the counterman’s family.

In old times, the countermen were the clerks who actuated the orders of the master. The countermen were hired to work on the contract stipulating the mutual terms with the employer: service life, salary, accommodation. Sometimes they worked 16 hours a day, so usually they lived close to the object or directly in it.

The counterman of Timofey Andreyevich Karghin, the owner of the Karghin mill, was Nikolay Vasiliyevich Popov, who later became the owner’s son-in-law having married his elder daughter Alexandra.

The novel “The Quiet Don” by M.A.Sholokhov describes the events which took place on the mill farmstead of Mokhov. In reality it was the mill farmstead of T.A.Karghin in Stanitsa Karghinskaya.

Recently the reconstruction of the Mill Office has been finished. Now there is the Department of the historical and memorial exhibitions of the National M.A.Sholokhov Museum-Reserve.

Elena Diyachenko