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WATER POWER, IN THREE PRINTINGS
The town existed as a mill seat before it existed as a town — though not in the version its own page tells: Chapman's Penn chapter is the founding text: "In 1831 or '32 a saw-mill was built on Bawbawgo creek, near where the village of Oceola now stands. Several years after this, another mill was built a little lower down; and by extending the same race, the one dam answered for both mills. This last mill was erected by Zelotes Bancroft; but the date is not certainly known. In 1856, this mill having been discontinued, Mr. Bancroft and his brother William erected a saw and grist-mill on the same site" — a mill Chapman found in 1880 owned and conducted by a nephew of the brothers, at a capacity of 25 barrels a day (pp. 789–790); Zelotes Bancroft's own sketch styles him "proprietor of Bancroft's flouring-mill at Osceola" (p. 802). Howard repeats the sequence at his strength: a sawmill on the creek in 1832, the power "used ever since for milling purposes, both for saw mill and grist mill," and "the name of Zelotes Bancroft and that of his family is inseparably connected with the milling business at this point" (p. 295). Neither book names the first mill's builder, and neither gives the year as 1833. The town's published history tells it otherwise — "William Ireland built a saw mill at Osceola in 1833, damming the Baugo at that point and building a bridge over the Baugo at the same time. This was the first saw mill in this locality" — and sites the seat, become the Bancroft flour mill, behind the present American Legion hall. That version is printed here as the town history's version: its dam-and-bridge act and its builder appear in no county history, and the one town-site act the books document for William Ireland is of a different kind — in 1835 he stood proprietor of a paper town, Canton, on this same creek, in the next article's telling. What survives all three printings is the seat itself: one dam's fall of Baugo water, worked from the settlement's first years into the flouring era, at the ground the town was later platted around. The mills at depth are the Businesses leg's record.