The capital costs that would have been required to make the mill viable would have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now, as president of the Helmetta Borough Council, Mr. Tancredi is one of those presiding over an effort to make the mill site into something vital again.
He'll make the mills feel comfortable with us and know that we're going to help the industry".
The first priority was to make the mill as weathertight as possible.
Ms Edmundson makes "The Mill on the Floss" the story of Maggie Tulliver, rather than Maggie and her brother Tom equally.
They have made the mill complex, which Ms. Benish says dates back 400 or 500 years — they're not sure — into their lives' work.
Postrecession, Telluride's construction-driven second-home market is not what it was either, and for many residents, that has made the mill and the idea of reopened mines all the more attractive.
The McLeans' proclivity for old ways and old machinery made the mill with its 30 outbuildings a natural for preservation.
There is a set of belt-driven elevators, remarkable for its time, that moved the grains from chutes to hoppers, and even from floor to floor, making the mill almost fully automatic.
It took 10 years to make the Dreifa Mills wheel turn again.
