MILLBRIDGE — At first you might think he’s doing it to celebrate the past, but Frank Deal says he’s really in this thing for Rachel Moss’ molasses cookies.

Frank’s sons, Jerry and Ted Deal, got into it because they wanted to build a molasses mill like an old one Jerry saw in the mountains. Their friend, Don Morgan, comes from a molasses family.

The neighbors, E.K. Graham and Bob Weast, like to help whenever they can. And they like molasses.

The gang has just produced its first 65 quarts of molasses from a restored molasses mill off Millbridge Road. That’s not to say a molasses mill had ever been there before.

“We had never actually been involved in this before,” Frank Deal says. The thing came together a piece at a time.

Here’s what happened.

Jerry Deal found a 1930s cane mill in Chattanooga, brought it home and restored it. Originally the mill was stationary, but the Deals adapted it to fit on a rebuilt wagon.

They powered it with a 1946 Massey-Harris Pony tractor pulled out of the woods four years ago. It was such a mess it had to be rebuilt, but now it’s bright with new paint and parts, and it runs like new, Frank Deal says.

Then they tore down the remains of a 100-year-old barn and used the oak, which had never been painted, to build a pavilion to house the mill. The wood was so hard they had to use screws because they couldn’t hammer nails into it.

Next they laid bricks to build a furnace-type fireplace with a chimney for boiling the cane juice into molasses. A flue liner runs top to bottom in the chimney, so the chimney draws perfectly. And since you have to skim the liquid continuously as it cooks, they built several skimmers on long wooden handles, too.

The boiling pan holds 80 gallons of juice. You have to evaporate 100 gallons to produce 14 or 15 gallons of molasses. It took the Deals and their neighbors three cookings to produce their 65 quarts of molasses, made from an acre of sugar cane they grew themselves right along Millbridge Road.

“It was hard to get it going,”Frank Deal says, “because we had such a dry summer. It just didn’t want to start.”

But, eventually, it did start, grew, was cut and hauled to the mill and squeezed through the horizontal rollers to a trough that poured it into a pan simmering over the fire. When it reached the proper stage, the turn of a spigot ran molasses into jars just as slick as you please.

Except a couple of early experiments didn’t turn out too well. Mary Deal says the men didn’t cook the first batches long enough, so it wasn’t very good.

“You have to cook it until it gets frog eyes,” she said. As the cane juice thickens, the bubbles simmering on top begin to look like frog eyes, and then you’ve got molasses. Not before.

Don Morgan’s father, June Morgan, was the molasses king of Rowan County, producing 100 gallons a day, Frank Deal says. Don’s aunt, Neva Morgan, who is 100 years old, knows about molasses from the years when her father made it in the early 1930s. Visiting the Millbridge operation brought back a lot of memories, she said. She remembers when you could buy molasses for 25 cents a gallon. Now it’s $8 a quart.

For Frank Deal, Neva’s visit pulled everything together.

“She was the link from the past,” he said.

He’s got some pretty good molasses stories from the present, too. He thinks Bob Weast is “kindly addicted to molasses,” because his mother used to keep a jug on the table when he was young. While the Millbridge group was boiling the molasses in the new-old setup, everybody had hot dogs for lunch. Weast dipped his in molasses before he ate it.

Another time, when Weast and Graham were eating together in a restaurant, Weast sent the waitress off for molasses. She came back with a bottle of corn syrup.

“He probably didn’t know the difference,”Frank Deal jokes.

But, as Mary Deal observes, he probably did know the difference, because “the taste just isn’t the same.”

Which brings us back to Rachel Moss’ cookie recipe. Mary uses it all the time. The recipe uses half a cup of molasses to produce about 40 cookies per batch, and Frank eats them as fast as she can bake them.

“That’s why I’ve got to keep a good supply of molasses coming,” he says.

To bake the cookies, you just shape dough into small balls, roll them in sugar and put them on a cookie sheet. They flatten out by themselves.

Frank says he’s had a lot of different molasses cookies in his days, but these are perfect. Just the right flavor. Just the right texture.

“Just that taste you can’t do without.”