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Reconstruction of the Mill of Timofey Karghin is being Completed

The Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov is completing the reconstruction of the famous mill of Timofey Karghin described in the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” by M.A.Sholokhov.

The farmstead of T.A.Karghin is an architectural memorial of the Upper Don, where the Sholokhov Museum is intended to display a fragment of the Don Cossack history and tell, how on the border of the centuries an ordinary farmstead of a thrifty Cossack, owing to his efforts and economic discipline, turned into a centre of technical and cultural progress in the north of the Voysko Donskoye Region.

The farmstead of T.A.Karghin is closely connected with the life and work of M.A.Sholokhov: at the mill he spent his childhood, youth and began working. The mill workers became the prototypes of Sholokhov’s personages, the farmstead is described in “The Tales of the Don”, the mill of Mokhov in the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” is quite like that of Karghin’s. It was here that the famous fight between Cossacks and Tavrians took place.

The farmstead of a Cossack uryadnik (noncommissioned officer),Timofey Karghin, near the River Chir had been formed by 1900: a nice house and offices were built on one bank of the river, on the other a garden and a vegetable plantation were laid out.

The mill started functioning in 1905. For it Karghin purchased the most advanced equipment. There was an inn for the customers, a barn with a shed for agricultural machines to be sold and leased to Cossacks who were engaged in soil cultivation. As a final stage, a cinema “Ideal”, the first cinematograph in the north of the Voysko Donskoye Region, was opened, which attracted to the mill the people from the entire neighbourhood.

The mill of Karghin was superior in the quality and quantity of the produced flour to all the windmills and watermills in the upper Don region. The people went there not only to grind flour, but also to learn about the novelties in agricultural machinery and purchase something for their farms, and to join the art of cinema – to see “how people are running on the wall”.

In 1920, after the Soviet Power was established, the farmstead was nationalized; the house of T.A.Karghin was occupied by procurement office No 32, headed by A.M.Sholokhov, the writer’s father. Then, in 1921–1922, Mikhail Sholokhov himself started working. The cinema “Ideal” was used as a club, where young Sholokhov was an active member and began his first writing experience. The young writer created a number of small plays, which were successfully performed on the stage by the amateur actors with Mikhail among them.

The long research carried out by the museum-workers resulted in a great deal of information acquired: recollections of old residents and relatives of T.A.Karghin, the farmstead construction drawings, the identified locations of the lost buildings and details of their façades. The researchers studied the materials of the State Archives of the Rostov Region on mill business late in the XIX–early XX century, received a copy of the mill project, identified the equipment list and layout plan.

The Museum managed to purchase the mill equipment analogous to that used at the mill in the time of Timofey Karghin. At present, the works on the equipment installation are practically completed.

The mill house has been reconstructed and soon will open for visitors. They will see a building of the last century, unique equipment supplied by the mill construction company “Anton Erlanger and Company^”, which worked at the market since 1882 and enjoyed a great prestige, will learn the technology of flour production on a roller mill. By the end of the year a grain barn and an outbuilding with a shed will have been reconstructed.

Quite soon the farmstead of Timofey Karghin will acquire its original look as M.A.Sholokhov saw it at the beginning of his literary career.

Pyotr Donskov
Nataliya Chubkova