The mill on Section 23 — the Sheffield, then Siders', mill

Chapman (1880), pp. 676–677; Howard (1907) I, pp. 285–288 (the Lyon paper, South Bend Weekly Tribune, 6 July 1901, reprinted whole)

The one industry the ground ever held before the town was a flouring mill on the river side of the townsite section. Chapman places it exactly: "There is a grist-mill on section 23, on the river… Prior to the erection of the grist-mill by Mr. Harris, Mr. Weaver had built a saw-mill on the same location; Mr. Weaver also had a carding-machine and fulling-mill." The mill's whole course is carried by a paper the South Bend Weekly Tribune printed on 6 July 1901 — "the Passing of the Old Gray Mill," from the pen of Richard H. Lyon — which Howard reprints entire. The grist mill was built in the winter of 1836–'37 by Jonas Harris, a Quaker from Richmond, Indiana, who had come to the county in 1832; Burton Swearingen and Samuel Brooks, "both practical millwrights," were the contractors; it first ran in the summer of 1837 with Ephraim Trueblood as its first miller — 26 by 36 feet, three and a half stories, two sets of buhrs from the beginning, one for flour and one for meal; in autumn, teams waited "half a mile in either direction" for their turn. Harris died about 1843 and was buried, at his own request, on the farm back of the house, his wife Barbara Beeson Harris later beside him — a grave the paper says still lay undisturbed under cultivation in 1901, its place "really unknown." The 160-acre mill farm was bought late in 1843 by J. and E. S. Sheffield and Edward Carpenter of New York City; Carpenter took charge in 1844 and built the large house on the bluff behind the mill. Mary Elting came into possession on a mortgage sale in 1860; Dr. Robert Harris and Elisha Hall bought in 1864; John Siders bought in 1866, and "Mr. Siders and sons conducted it for many years" — the mill's lasting name is Siders' mill (the 1875 atlas directory lists Mary Ann Siders, "Owner of Mill"). The late John F. Kirby was among the later owners (Chapman's transcription reads the name "Curly"; the Lyon paper's "Kirby" governs, and the conflict stands in the pass note), then James L. Robinson, who sold about 1897 to the South Bend Power Company; the company tore the old structure away. Its end, as Lyon tells it, was a muskrat's work: a burrow under the flume, rains washing out the foundations, until "the ancient structure was lying upon its side a helpless ruin." The two accounts differ on the sawmill — Chapman gives Weaver a saw-mill on the same location before the grist mill; Lyon gives Harris a saw mill "about half a mile above the mouth of the creek" — and both print, unmerged, in the pass note's register. By the time the Roselawn territory petitioned in 1915, the mill had been gone some fifteen years; nothing of it stands in the town's record, and no carrier reached places any part of it inside the town's present bounds — it stood on the section's river side, on the creek, west of the corridor the town grew up on.