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1837 – c. late 1880s
The mills were the town's first industry, and their draining was its first industry's end. A gristmill was built on Potato Creek in 1837 — the creek's only gristmill — and a sawmill in 1839 by Hiram Bean and Alonzo Hill. The mills stood at North Liberty; a 2003 newspaper survey of the county's vanishing mills places one nineteenth-century mill "at almost the same point as today's Worster Lake dam" in Potato Creek State Park, and the last mill downstream south of the Walnut Road crossing, where a WPA crew in the 1930s reportedly dug up part of it, a vertical saw blade under the road. Who built the gristmill is a standing conflict, printed whole: Chapman (1880) and the nomination name no builder; a 1991 North Liberty newspaper column names George Waldsmith; and the 1875 atlas directory lists a George Waldsmith as a Section 30 farmer, settled in the county in 1838, with no milling against his name. The Waldsmith claim stands single-carrier and unproven. Daniel R. McKenzie, from Monroe County, New York, came in 1852 and obtained control of the North Liberty mills — the atlas directory prints him plainly: "McKenzie, D. R. — Milling, North Liberty Mills — settled 1852." In 1874 he partnered with Henry Bowen, a Virginian from Rappahannock County who had arrived in 1868 — "Bowen, H. — Milling, North Liberty Mills — settled 1868" — and the atlas's views index carries a view of the firm of McKenzie & Bowen. The flour mill's directory life runs: McKenzie & Bowen, flour mill (Polk 1880–81); "McKinzie & Bowen" (1882–83, the spelling as transcribed); and in 1884–85 two flour-mill firms in one edition — "Bowen Henry, flour mill" at the head of the entry and "Knepp, Dreibelbis & Co, flour mill" in the list — whether successive operators within the edition year, a partnership restated, or a directory duplication is unresolved on the carriers reached, and prints as a conflict. The end came with steam: the mills "had switched to steam power by the mid-1880s when two men were hired to dig a ditch by hand in order to drain the millpond, the last one remaining on Potato Creek. Within a few years, the gristmill and the sawmill both closed." No carrier reached prints a calendar date for the draining — the single most-wanted date in this section — and it stands as a named gap on its named settler: Frederick Karst's Potato Creek: From Pioneer Mill Stream to Gentle Lake (1980), bibliographically confirmed at the Indiana State Library (IND REF 977.201 S143k), a shelf read; the book is digitized nowhere searched. The mill seat today is at or near the Worster Lake dam; no mill building survives in the district record.