A water wheel located outside of the mill would have been destroyed
by winter ice. For this reason, the original wooden water wheel and the
nineteenth century turbines were located in a chamber inside the mill.

Reductions in water levels now make it impossible to
operate the flour and buckwheat mills simultaneously.

The Moulin Légaré is the oldest continuously operating flour mill in North America to be powered exclusively by water. It was constructed by seigneur Louis-Eustache Lambert Dumont in 1762 and it continues to produce thirty to forty tonnes of white and buckwheat flour each year.

Buckwheat is ground between two millstones inside the wooden collar pictured here.
The raw kernals are fed down a shute into the hole in the centre of the millstone.