The Mills Become Towns 185 



building put up on the far side of the mountains. The upper 

 waters of the creek thread cornfields which are thirty-five 

 hundred feet above sea level. There were years when those 

 fields yielded fifty bushels of corn per acre. 



The men who pushed westward, beyond Reems' fort and 

 mill, were rebels against the power of the trading class in the 

 Carolinas. In Cumberland Gap, in Tennessee, they built an- 

 other mill with an enormous overshot wheel which still stands 

 there, though ruined. Those who built it were the men who 

 gathered under the spreading tree on the Watauga and formed 

 the first republic on this continent to be based on a written 

 constitution framed by a community of American-born free- 

 men. 



The New Englanders who followed in single file the cov- 

 ered wagon with the words FOR THE OHIO COUNTRY painted 

 on its black canvas top, as this started out at Ipswich, Massa- 

 chusetts, on December 3, 1787, had an eight-weeks march 

 before they came to SummernTs Ferry on the Youghiogheny. 

 The spring floods took them, and the twenty-six others who 

 had made the trip with Rufus Putnam, down the Ohio to the 

 mouth of the Muskingum. It was on that stream that they 

 built the first grist mill in the Black Wilderness. The mill was 

 also the first business venture west of the Ohio. In that rich 

 corn land it paid profitable dividends. 



By the charter of the Ohio Company, lots were set aside for 

 mills, schools and churches, "the three essentials of civiliza- 

 tion." The first grist mill in Ohio was that built on Wolf 

 Creek two miles from its junction with the Muskingum River 

 by Colonel Robert Oliver, Major Hatfield White and Captain 

 John Dodge, all veterans of the Revolution. The stones were 

 brought from Laurel Hill, Pennsylvania, and the mill was ready 

 to grind in 1790. Its record flow was fifteen bushels per hour. 

 Today a Grange Hall stands on part of the foundations of 

 the original mill. Men who had spent their youth fighting 

 the Indians, the French and the English looked forward to 

 a comfortable and prosperous old age as millers. It was the one 



