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Sawmill, then flour mill · Coles Mill, Wines Mill, Woodlawn Mill, Volland Mill
On the record
Founded: in existence by 14 June 1834; erection year not established. Bates (§XXVI) states expressly that "the exact date of the erection of the David Coles sawmill on the Maumee River is unknown," and dates its known existence from Coles advertising the mill for a buyer in the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel of 14 June 1834. Conflicts flagged: Bates’s front map lists the mill from 1834 — that is the advertisement year, not an erection year; and the archive.org Bates text renders the newspaper name as "Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinels" (plural).
Founders: David Coles, founder of the original sawmill. Marshall Wines, purchaser in autumn 1838, added the flour mill. A later summary conflicts on the builder and is flagged, not followed: the Canal Society’s September 2017 Tumble says Wines himself built the sawmill, whereas Bates and the 1889 Valley both attribute the original sawmill to Coles.
What it did: originally a water-powered sawmill on the Maumee. After Wines’s purchase, a flour mill was erected immediately to the east. Bates’s later-years description (three-and-a-half stories, $6,000 capital, 20,000 bushels storage, about fifty barrels of flour daily) describes the mill in its later years, not the original Coles sawmill, and is not backdated here.
Course: sited between the river and the north bank of the Wabash & Erie Canal at Hanover Street. Wines’s estate was known as "Woodlawn," and the mill took the same name. Wines died in 1842; Bates says he sold the mills shortly before his death to Samuel Hanna and Oehmig Bird (Hanna & Bird). Ownership then changed frequently: Bostick & Fronefield (1858), Fronefield & Volland (1859), Trentman & Volland (1860), Orff & Volland (1861), Comparet & Haskell (1863); Esther A. Orff later became sole owner.
Fate: totally destroyed by fire on 24 March 1871, while Esther A. Orff was sole owner, and never rebuilt.
Find them on this page
- § 05 — business
Sources: Roy M. Bates, The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (1942), §XXVI — https://archive.org/stream/waterpoweredmill00bate/waterpoweredmill00bate_djvu.txt ; Valley of the Upper Maumee River, Vol. I (1889), Part 24 — https://ldsgenealogy.com/IN/books/Valley-of-the-upper-Maumee-River-with-historical-account-of-Allen-County-and-the-city-of-Fort-Wayne-Indiana-Volume-I-part-24.htm ; Canal Society of Indiana, The Tumble, September 2017 — https://indcanal.org/newsletters/the-tumble-september-2017/ . Sources as cited in the profile.