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Richard H. Lyon, "the Passing of the Old Gray Mill," South Bend Weekly Tribune, 6 July 1901; reprinted in Howard (1907) I, pp. 285–288
The mill on the townsite section survives because a man wrote its obituary. By 1901 the flouring mill Jonas Harris built in 1836–'37 was a ruin — undermined by a muskrat, its foundations washed out, "lying upon its side a helpless ruin" — and the Weekly Tribune carried a full paper on its passing: the teams lined "half a mile in either direction" in the autumn grinding season, the millwrights and millers named, the bluff house with its five fireplaces, the builder buried behind the house in a grave already lost. Howard thought the paper worth reprinting whole, and it is nearly everything this build knows of the ground's one industry (the before-the-city file carries its facts). As folklore its lesson is the mechanism: a place with no village, no church of its own on the site and no newspaper kept its one monument in memory through a single piece of journalism, preserved by a county historian's judgment that it belonged in the permanent record. The mill's afterlife is entirely textual — no stone of it is recorded standing — and the telling, Lyon's, is its monument.