Country sawmills usually had only one or two saws and gristmills just one or two pairs of millstones (10). A country millhouse was generally only a one- or two-story wooden structure with one waterwheel. Country millhouses and milldams were as modest as the millstreams. Johnson’s Creek in Essex County, Massachusetts, a typical New England millstream, was only 5 kilometers long, but in 1820 it could power five country gristmills and four sawmills (9). Country sawmills in New Brunswick, Canada, were mostly on small streams and brooks, where undershot wheels, although less efficient than overshot wheels, allowed for falls of 1.5 meters or less (8). In western New York, where in the early 1800s most of the population had migrated from New England, a country millstream was usually a middle-sized brook with a swift current, rocky bottom, and steady flow (7). When the Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it would build upon the knowledge of the old-time country millers. When the United States census began recording the number of country mills in 1840, the nation boasted more than 28,000 gristmills and nearly 32,000 sawmills (5). A scholar of frontier New York has estimated that by 1825 there was on average one gristmill and one sawmill for every two townships (4). One English traveler in America shortly after the Revolutionary War counted 1,100 mill privileges in New Jersey, a thousand in frontier Kentucky, and in Pennsylvania “almost innumerable mill seats … conveniently distributed by Providence throughout the State” (3). In the late 1700s, Thomas Jefferson thought that every “neighborhood” in America had a gristmill, and in 1820 Connecticut luminary and Yale President Timothy Dwight remarked that gristmills and sawmills were “furnished in abundance in every parish” in New England and New York” (2). Most rural communities had at least one such mill, and many had several (1). Country mills were integral parts of the preindustrial American economy. From the beginning of the colonial era in the mid-1600s to the late 1800s, the hundreds of streams and brooks that flowed across New England and New York powered thousands of small gristmills, sawmills, and fulling mills. The basic technology for harnessing waterpower existed well before the Industrial Revolution.
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