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Autumn 1830 – sold to the Jenney Electric Light and Power Company 1887; mill abandoned soon after
Founded: In the autumn of 1830 Henry Rudisill and Henry Johns erected a flouring mill on the right (west) bank of the St. Joseph River, in the southwest quarter of Section 36, Washington Township — at the time about three-quarters of a mile north of the village of Fort Wayne, on what is now Spy Run Avenue, directly across from the later Indiana Service Corporation shops. The dam, near the present State Street Bridge, was built largely by volunteer labour of township residents under David Bush.
Founders: Henry Rudisill (born 1801, Lancaster, Pennsylvania; came to Fort Wayne as representative of Barr & McCorkle of Baltimore, who prepared the original plat of the city) and Henry Johns.
What it did: A flouring mill. It began with one set of buhrs, increased in later years to four, produced about sixty-five barrels of flour a day and employed about seven men.
Course: The mill was generally known as the "Johns Mill" until Johns's death, when sole ownership passed to Rudisill. Rudisill died 6 February 1858 and his son H. J. Rudisill Jr. ran the mill until 1866, when he moved to California and left it with John E. Hill Jr. An overshot wheel powered it until about 1880, then Leffel and Little Giant wheels. The flood of February 1876 badly damaged the dam, which was repaired. John H. Bass and Oscar Simons bought the property 4 November 1879; the City of Fort Wayne's Water Works Committee recommended condemning it for its water rights, but the owners restrained the city on 11 September 1884. Bass & Simons rebuilt the dam in the fall of 1887.
Fate: On 25 November 1887 the Jenney Electric Light and Power Company bought the mill property, together with the entire canal feeder, for $67,000. The mill was abandoned shortly afterwards; the building stood into the early twentieth century before demolition. One of its stone buhrs came to rest on the grounds of the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society museum. Bates lists a second, separate Johns Mill (his No. XVII) on the St. Joseph in St. Joseph Township; it is not this mill, and its site carries the Fort Wayne Paper Mills entry below.
Sources:
- Roy M. Bates, The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (1942), No. XIX — site, dam, output, ownership chain, the 1887 sale.