Mills on the rivers

1830 — 1900

First, the rivers were made to grind: The first industrial use of Fort Wayne's rivers was the oldest one: falling water. In 1830 Henry Rudisill built the town's first gristmill on the St. Joseph, at a point Griswold's township history describes as chosen for "special facilities for building the dam" — the right bank of the St. Joseph — and the Rudisill mill wheels, in Griswold's phrase, "continued to grind with water that passed the old dam in the St. Joseph" long after. The feeder dam built for the canal in 1832–34 doubled as mill water for the neighborhood, and the canal's St. Marys aqueduct ended its days serving a mill: it was razed in 1883, the canal history records, "when its flow of water was insufficient to operate the mill of its leaseholder, C. Tresselt & Sons." Mills were why small dams and races multiplied on the St. Joseph above town and on the creeks — Spy Run, Cedar Creek, the Aboite — each firm and its books belonging to the Business section, the waterworks themselves to this one.

The largest industrial river user of the century made the logic explicit. When Charles L. Centlivre sited his French Brewery on the St. Marys at Lima Plank Road (now Spy Run Avenue) in 1862, the brewery's own history lists what the place offered: a German market, rail service — "and three rivers from which to draw water and ice for brewing." The brewery opened September 27, 1862, drew its process water and its winter ice from the river at its door, got artificial refrigeration in 1878, and in the Prohibition reshuffle of 1919 re-emerged briefly under the name Centlivre Ice and Cold Storage Company — a river-ice business wearing a brewery's buildings.

Sources:

1. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), township chapters — Henry Rudisill's 1830 gristmill on the St. Joseph, the dam site, and the mill's long grinding.
2. The Wabash-Erie Canal (Elba H. Raffety, 1916), as carried in the Canal Society's The Tumble (January 2022) — the Tresselt lease and the aqueduct's razing in 1883.
3. Fort Wayne Beer, "C. L. Centlivre Brewing Co." — the 1862 siting for "water and ice," the September 27, 1862 opening on the St. Marys, the 1878 refrigeration, and the 1919 Ice and Cold Storage name.