The Mills Become Towns 187 



shafts to replace the more primitive wooden ones enabled the 

 millers to add to their occupations. After the Revolution 

 scores of grist mills along the little rivers of New England 

 turned into factories for the making of tools, nails, notions, 

 cotton and woolen goods. Their products were sent out in 

 Yankee clipper ships to be sold all over the world. They were 

 loaded on Conestoga wagons and carted to the western 

 frontier. 



One of Plymouth's old grist mills became Eli Terry's clock 

 factory. When he started work on five hundred clocks at once, 

 his neighbors shook their heads, aghast at such temerity. They 

 said there weren't five hundred people to buy clocks in the 

 whole country. Two years later, Terry sold out to two of his 

 workmen, Seth Thomas and Silas Hadley, to devote his time 

 to designing new models. One of these, for which Thomas paid 

 him one thousand dollars, was used to make six thousand 

 clocks one year, and twelve thousand the next. Each copy 

 sold for fifteen dollars. 



At the close of the Revolution, the valleys of western New 

 York State were still held by the Iroquois Indians. But in the 

 same year that the first settlers started for Ohio, others began 

 pouring into the country around the Finger Lakes, "like bees 

 out of the Connecticut hive." A settlement was made at 

 Mountville on Owasco Lake in Cayuga County. Naturally 

 enough, the first business in the town was a grist mill. Ten 

 years later there had been added to the grist mill a barrel 

 factory, a triphammer factory, a harness factory, an auger fac- 

 tory, a plow factory, a scythe factory, a distillery, a linseed-oil 

 mill and a woolen mill. It was in the last that Millard Fillmore 

 served his apprenticeship. 



The plow factory manufactured wooden moldboard plows. 

 This was the type generally in use on American farms. Vari- 

 ous experiments had been made with it. Jefferson spent some 

 time working out a scientific basis for the curve of the mold- 

 board; and a man named Newbold, living in New Jersey, had 

 patented a plow with an iron share, in 1797. But farmers are 



