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1849–1889 · the mills read as one system
Read firm by firm, the mills article is a roster; read as a system, it is one machine whose raw material was the township itself. The inputs: a heavily timbered township being converted to farms; water standing in sloughs and marshes that drainage would later take; and labour from the farm households the people file records. The prime mover, from 1849, was steam — boilers fired in a country where the fuel was the same forest being cleared, so the works consumed their own raw material twice over. The conversion: Earl and Gilmore (1849), Coquillard's mill under Shidler (1854 to about 1864), Adam Shidler's mill near the town (1861), the Slough brothers in Section 19 (from about 1871), and by the dated census point of 1889 six mill firms in the manufacturers' directory, the Atlas and directory record together showing saw and grist work side by side — timber in, lumber and flour out. The output's direction is in the record: lumber hauled north to South Bend by wagon in 1861, a year of it by one named hauler, decades before the railroad gave the system an export artery in 1884. The system's product was therefore double: lumber as a good, and cleared, drained, farmable land as the permanent residue — the industry that made the farms file possible. That binding of raw material, fuel and power into one account is the first industrial system of this ground, at the strength of the carriers named.