Few things on the planet look as satisfyingly like what they are as Clyde’s Cider Mill does on a cold blue morning a few days before Thanksgiving. It stands on a hillside in Old Mystic, Connecticut, surrounded by smoky November trees, feeding a steady column of steam into the still air as it ingests the contents of a truckful of McIntosh apples.

Inside, varnished with late-autumn light, a fifteen-horsepower engine ticks over with the always surprising quietness of steam, powering overhead shafting whose belts at the moment are running the grinder. On their journey to cider, the apples meet the grinder first. It’s up in the loft above the ceiling, clacking as it chews the fruit into a coarse pulp that drops down onto the press—or, more accurately, onto a large nylon cloth. A number of people are attending to the operation. “This is Barbara, my wife,” says Jack Bucklyn, the mill’s owner, “and Annette, my daughter. This is Harold, my son-in-law, and Amy, my granddaughter.” Harold has been adjusting the engine, but now he and his daughter are wrapping the mound of mashed apple neatly in the cloth. The air is quick with a sweet-sour tang.

Amy and Harold take a rack from a stack of them against the wall (they’re handsome things, these racks, square latticework grids about four feet on a side, bossed with the copper nails that hold them together), put it on top of the folded cloth, spread another one on it, fill this, too, with apple, and fold it over. They repeat the process. Now there are three tiers—rack, cloth, apple—and Jack Bucklyn throws a wooden lever. The grinder stops. “Everything’s computerized,” says Bucklyn.

Father and daughter push against the stack of racks, and the whole cider table pivots a 180-degree arc to bring its cargo underneath the formidable iron bulk of the press itself: No. 2, made by the Boomer and Boschert Press Company of Syracuse, New York.

Bucklyn pulls another lever, and the press descends, pushing on the racks until cider squirts through the blankets and runs clear and fast down the table into a holding tank beneath. “We can do up to ten cloths at a time,” says Bucklyn, “and that would give you between 250 and 265 gallons of cider. Running full tilt, we can demolish five tons of apples in about an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Bucklyn is a born raconteur, but without a trace of the manifest self-love that term usually euphemizes. He reaches into the press and pulls out a stone jug. “Care for a drink from the minister’s barrel?” He pours. “That’s a Yankee joke. The idea is that it was always good to have the hard stuff close to hand just in case the minister came calling.” The clergyman’s special reserve is dark, rich, and strong.

The owner is at the tail end of the make-or-break nine-week cidering season that has had him up daily in the black pre-dawn, driving into southern Rhode Island and eastern Massachusetts to personally acquire apples that are up to his standards, but he wears the hectic couple of months lightly. “My grandfather started out down in the village, running a little press, renting power from the shaft of a sawmill. It was the biggest decision of his life when he built this mill. Got it up and running in the fall of 1898. It’s the last real cider mill in the country—that is, one that has never been anything else. It’s not a converted barn, for instance; the same company that made the press designed the building.”

Amy and Harold are stacking racks again. Bucklyn holds up a square-sided copper nail. “In 1946, when B and B were still in business—a great operation, all these old men wearing long aprons and black silk caps, wonderful people—I was talking with Mr. Beale there and I asked him about rack nails. He said they hadn’t made them since 1924, but he might have a few around. He said he’d look and sell them to me for ten cents a pound. I said I’d take all he had, and a few days later this huge tub shows up. I mean, this big fiber drum solid full of copper rack nails. I have the world’s largest supply of rack nails.”

Not that he runs through racks at such a clip. “They last about twenty-five years. They’re basswood. Everyone else uses oak these days; it’s cheaper and easier. But basswood is traditional, so we stay with basswood. Oh yes, we’re traditional here. Maybe,” he concludes happily, “that’s why we never make any money.”

The tall room centering on the immaculately painted and maintained press hums with orderly bustle, with steady purpose. On the wooden levers, a couple of simple instructions have been chalked so another grandchild can begin to learn the drill. Outside, the day has warmed up a little. Maybe it’s the extraordinary sense of having passed a couple of hours inside a William Sidney Mount painting, maybe it’s simply the minister’s barrel, but I feel about as good as I have all year.