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1827 – 1888
Founded: Completed August 1827. Roy M. Bates's specialist study The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (Feb 1942, Allen County Public Library) states plainly: "The first water-powered mill erected in Allen County was completed in August, 1827, by James Barnett and Samuel Hanna." The News-Sentinel city history agrees ("Hanna and James Barnett erected the city's first gristmill in 1827"), as does the ACGSI 1820s timeline ("Sam Hanna and James Barnett open the town's first grist mill"). Conflict flagged, not hidden: Brice's History of Fort Wayne (1868) dates the same mill to 1824–25 — "in 1824-5 Samuel Hanna and James Barnett built a mill some three miles from Fort Wayne, now known as 'Beaver's mill.'" The location (several miles from the village) and the Beaver name match Bates's mill, so this is one mill with two datings, not two mills. The 1827 completion date is carried because the specialist mill study and the newspaper milestones agree on it; Brice's earlier dating may reflect construction begun earlier, but that reading is not established on the sources in hand.
Founders: Samuel Hanna (entry 1) and James Barnett, his trading-post partner (entry 1).
What it did: Water-powered grist/flour milling — the county's first water-powered mill of any kind in Bates's count of 35 mills erected 1827–1885. It ended the era when grain and flour had to be hauled to the nearest mills in Ohio (ACGSI timeline / News-Sentinel milestones). Detzer's Daily Life in Early Fort Wayne calls the gristmill "the boon most appreciated" by the early households.
Course: Stood on the left bank of the St. Marys River, a short distance south of the present Oakdale Bridge (State Roads 1 and 3), in what is now Foster Park — southeast quarter of Section 15, Wayne Township, several miles from the village at erection (Bates). Sold a few years later to Louis H. Davis, who sold to Asa Fairfield and Samuel C. Freeman (business as Fairfield and Freeman; Fairfield operated the first boat through Fort Wayne on the Wabash & Erie Canal). The partnership dissolved and A. C. Beaver bought the mill and named it "Glenwood" — the "Beaver's mill" of Brice. George Esmond bought the Glenwood Mill on 1 November 1876 for $24,000. A ledger of the mill's accounts for 1842–1844, from Fairfield's ownership, survived in private hands when Bates wrote (1942).
Fate: Closed — destroyed by fire 15 May 1888 and never rebuilt (Bates). The sequence at the end: the mill burned completely on 27 February 1878; Esmond rebuilt in brick from 31 May 1878, completed 1 October 1878 at a cost of $20,000 (three stories, 44×64 ft, 60–80 hp from one 60-inch and two 56-inch turbines, five men, 80 barrels of flour a day, 10,000-bushel storage). After the dam was partly destroyed by high water on 26 April 1880, Esmond converted it to steam power. The Esmond Milling Co. was incorporated 4 June 1886 with $60,000 capital stock. Esmond sold on 4 October 1887 to I. S. Tevis of Kentucky and T. S. Proctor of Tennessee; just over seven months later the mills burned again, loss $40,000, "and, after sixty-one years of continuous operation, were never rebuilt" (Bates).
Sources:
- Bates, The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (1942), §XXV "The Esmond Mill" (full text, Internet Archive, digitised by ACPL) — https://archive.org/stream/waterpoweredmill00bate/waterpoweredmill00bate_djvu.txt
- Waynedale News, "The Esmond Mill" (2003, reproducing Bates) — https://waynedalenews.com/2003/10/the-esmond-mill/
- News-Sentinel city history (1827 first gristmill) — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/rhist7.php
- Brice, History of Fort Wayne (1868), Part 35 (the conflicting 1824–25 dating) — https://ldsgenealogy.com/IN/books/History-of-Fort-Wayne-from-the-earliest-known-accounts-of-this-point-to-the-present-period-part-35.htm
- ACGSI, 1820–1829 Timeline of Allen County (1827 first grist mill) — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/county/timeline/1820s-timeline-of-allen-county-indiana.html