French, Flour Bag Seal, Corbeil
French, Flour Bag Seal, Corbeil, Image & Found by Ivan Jeffery
Found Hartland, Devon, 20mm.
* / 95, GRANDS MOULINS DE CORBEIL around // NOVEMBRE, FLEURS SUPERIEURES around
Identified by Philippe Lanez.
French flour mill bag seal.
"In the nineteenth century, milling went from being a small-scale, geographically dispersed, artisanal industry to a highly capitalistic industry dominated by a few dozen entrepreneures who set up large water-powered (and later steam- and electric-powered) mills to supply flour to the large cities and regional markets of France. The outstanding figure in this evolution was Aimé-Stanislas Darblay. Between the 1820s and 1860s, Darblay joined with his brother and later with his son Paul to build and operate a series of large mills that supplied flour on longterm contracts to the bakers of Paris ander the Six Marques label.
In the early years, the Darblay enterprise centered on the Saint-Maur mill, constructed in 1838 near the junction of the Seine and Marne rivers. It was powered by Fourneyron water turbines and incorporated the "American" system of milling - that is to say, it was a multistory, gravity-fed mill where grain went into the top and flour and bran came out the bottom with a minimum of human handling.{Flour mill, 19th century, Science Photo Library} In the 1860s, the centre of Darblay's operations shifted from Saint-Maur to Corbiel, souteast of Paris on the Essonne River. One of the oldest flour mills in France, Corbeil was probably the first one in the country to have the Amaerican system installed (in 1817) when it was owned by Hospices Générales de Paris. The Darblays leased Corbeil in 1838 and became outright owners in 1863, whereupon they sold Saint-Maur to the City of Paris and transferred its equipment to Corbeil.
...the Darblays moved into papermaking in 1868 by purchasing the Papeteries d'Essonnes. Because Paul Darblay focused increasingly on papermaking after his father's died in 1878, the Corbiel mills were recognized as a société anonyme in 1882. In 1888, the "Hungarian" milling system (in which cylinders replaced grindstones) was installed at Corbeil, and by 1900 the daily capacity of the mill had risen from 180 metric tons to 350 metric tons. That, plus the opening of an additional mill at Le Havre, kept Grands Moulins de Corbeil in first place among French milling companies at the turn of the century." The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800-1930 By Michael Stephen Smith.
A picture of the mill can be seen at Getty Images. And it would appear that the mill is still in use by Group Soufflet.
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