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1837 – 1880s
Potato Creek is the reason there is a town here at all: the town grew up around a gristmill on it. The Story of North Liberty section carries the course whole and this section points to it at the size the water owns: the gristmill of 1837, Hiram Bean and Alonzo Hill's sawmill of 1839 "not far from where the present grist-mill stands," a later newspaper history's judgment that Potato Creek "powered more mills than any other stream in the county," the North Liberty gristmill being the creek's only gristmill and the rest sawmills; Daniel R. McKenzie's control of the mills from 1852, his partnership with Henry Bowen in 1874, steam power by the mid-1880s, and both mills closing within a few years after the millpond was drained. No lock, canal, keelboat, or steamboat traffic ever belonged to this creek — it is a mill stream, too small to float commerce, and the navigation test prints as a negative by the stream's own nature and by the silence of every carrier reached. The creek's one race-and-pond system, the millpond above the town mills, left no standing work in the record reached.