Ann Arborites cavorting in the Argo Cascades, or communing with nature out by the rapids at Delhi, may not realize that these wonderful spots are actually relics of industrial sites created by the region’s first European settlers.

Ann Arbor’s earliest dwellings were log cabins, but most settlers wanted to live in frame houses. While it’s possible to saw trees into framing lumber by hand, it’s a tedious two-person task. Grinding grain was equally laborious. Using a log and a tree stump, an early resident wrote, it took half an hour to pound two gallons of dry corn in “so that one-half of it would pass through a sieve.”

Who wouldn’t want an easier way? Damming streams and building water-powered sawmills and gristmills was one of the most important tasks in any frontier settlement. Ann Arbor’s co-founder, John Allen, dammed his namesake creek just south of Huron St., about where Illi’s Auto Service is now; the millrace ran west of the creek down to just below Argo Dam, where it powered the City Mill, a flour mill a little north of the corner of Main and Depot.

There was a gristmill to grind corn on Traver Creek at Broadway, its dam and pond upstream near where Arbor Springs Water Company is now. Major Benjamin Woodruff (of Woodruff’s Grove) had a sawmill on Malletts Creek, near Huron River Dr. and Chalmers. But the Huron itself, which drops 200 feet from Portage Lake to Rawsonville, was the most prolific and coveted source of waterpower.

Major Woodruff opened the county’s first gristmill, on the Huron in Ypsilanti, in 1825. According to a 1989 Observer article by Jon Olson, it was followed the next year by Robert Noyes’ flouring mill and the Geddes brothers’ sawmill, both near the present corner of Dixboro and Geddes roads, and John Dix’s gristmill, nearby on Fleming Creek. Closer to downtown, “the first dam at Argo was probably built in 1825,” Olson wrote. “A number of businesses drew waterpower from the dam, including–from 1833 to 1885–a series of flour mills located at the present site of the [DTE] Argo Power Station.”

By 1843, there were fifty-one mill sites scattered throughout Washtenaw County. Some have been lovingly preserved; others are much changed, but still in the center of things. Others are just ruins now, and of some no trace can be found.

Dexter’s Mill Creek once powered several mills. One in the middle of town, on Main Street, was torn down after WWII to make room for a new fire station (now the sheriff’s substation). Upstream, where Shield Rd. crosses the creek, was a mill owned by the Bates family.

At Mast Rd., a gristmill, sawmill, and woolen mill all drew water from a dam owned by the Birkett family, who also owned a mill at Dover, north of Hudson Mills Metropark at Bell Rd. The Birketts gave Camp Birkett on Silver Lake to the YMCA; Camp Newkirk, at the site of the Dexter dam, to the Boy Scouts; and part of their estate at Prospect Hill to the state. Now called Peach Mountain, it’s the home of a U-M radio telescope.

There was a flour mill at Scio, just west of where Zeeb crosses the river. In his book Scio Village (Ghost Town with a Past), Nicholas Marsh quotes a description of it from the Dexter Leader in 1874 that goes into great detail about machines like Throop’s Wheat Brush. It concludes: “To follow the grain as it hurries hither and thither, up and down, until it is cleaned, and ground, and purified, and the flour is separated from all dross, and is ready to pack and ship, is too bewildering for any mind but the dusty miller’s who knows all the intricacies of its ways.”

The dust that coated the miller was explosive–most mills burned down at least once. Flour mills were cleaned thoroughly every night and employed a dust collector that pumped air through a large barrel studded with tubes capped by what looked like socks. The dust was saved, packaged as pastry flour, and sold at a hefty premium.

Delhi Mills, at Delhi Rd., was once bigger than Dexter, with as many as five different mills operating on both sides of the river. A sawmill, gristmill, woolen mill, plaster mill, and scythe factory made Delhi an industrial village of some stature. The homes remain, but the former mill district now forms part of Delhi Metropark. Downstream from Delhi, the former Osborne Mill is also a park, belonging to Washtenaw County.

The spot where the cute little Maple Rd. bridge crosses the river to Barton Hills was also once a thriving industrial area. Ann Arbor’s Cornwell brothers had a large paper mill there. In 1885, the Cornwells built another paper mill and dam between Barton Dam (then much smaller) and town. Its remains now form the approach for the pedestrian bridge to Barton Oxbow Park.

The rest of the dam was dynamited in 1892, ending what at the time was the costliest lawsuit in the county’s history.

Waterpower was so valuable that rights to use it were carefully defined. An 1848 warranty deed transferring property between Osborne family members, for example, noted that it included “all our and each of our right to the water power of said River on or opposite said lands,” which it further specified as the power created “by the erection of a dam not exceeding four feet in height above the surface of the water in the River at its usual height in times of low water, at the most eligible point for the erection of a dam across said section … Provided such dam and such raising of the water shall not in ordinary time of low water set the water back up stream to within thirty rods of the … grist and flouring mill called the Farmers Mill.”

The Cornwells were a prosperous Ann Arbor family, and much of their wealth was in mills: they also owned several paper mills in Ypsilanti, where Water Works Park is now; a dam and mill in a tiny settlement called Lowell, now the site of the Edison power dam in Superior Township; a pulp mill at Hudson Mills; and a mill just north of the prison at Jackson, manufacturing soda pulp. Several members of the family lived on Cornwell Place, on a bluff overlooking the river. Another Cornwell lived in the big brick mansion on Division just south of Carey St.

The dam that triggered the lawsuit was “said to be the finest on the Huron river,” according to a 1892 article in the Ann Arbor Register. “It was 170 feet long and over twelve feet high, affording 505 horsepower.” The Cornwells invested $40,000 to build the dam and mill–equivalent to about $1 million today. According to a 1990 Observer article by Lou Doll, however, no sooner had the mill gone into operation than it became clear that it was too close to the dam at Argo: “When the [Argo] Dam raised its flashboards–which controlled the depth of water behind the dam–to their highest point, water backed up into the new Cornwell Dam, interfering with the operation of its water wheels.”

The Cornwells sued the Argo owners. They countersued, claiming the new dam infringed on their established “pondage rights.” After an extended trial, the judge ruled in favor of the Argo group. The Cornwells were given a choice: pay $20,000 in damages, or see their dam destroyed.

After the Michigan Supreme Court upheld the decision, all the Cornwells could do was transfer the machinery to another mill and move on. The floodgates were opened, the Register reported, and “[w]ith a tumultuous rush the water burst through the opening, amid the cheers of onlookers … At the present time, the river at this point presents the appearance of a small Niagara, with fierce whirlpools and spraying eddies …” Once the pond was drained, the dam was destroyed with dynamite.

By then, the end of the age of waterpower was in sight. Many mills already had installed steam engines to provide power when the water level was too high or too low. Farmers also found that they could get more money for their crops if they shipped them by rail to larger mills unconstrained by the limits of water flow. Chelsea Milling Co., founded in 1901, is an example of such a “dry land” mill. The remaining water mills became less valuable, and many were sold to larger holding companies.

Ann Arbor, like the rest of the country, was turning toward fossil fuels for power–first coal from Appalachia, then oil from Pennsylvania. The adaptable Cornwells led the trend: after getting out of the paper business, they formed the Cornwell Coal Company. Its offices were at Fourth and Huron, just west of what is now the Hands-on Museum, and its coal yard was on Miller, east of the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks.

But the Huron had one last role to play in powering the city. In 1884, the Washtenaw Light and Power Company installed the area’s first hydroelectric generating plant at Geddes. After the mill at Argo burned in 1904, the Michigan Milling Company (Mimico) installed a powerhouse there to provide electricity to its City Mill and Central Mills on Allen Creek. (Originally a brewery, and now home to the Cavern Club, the Central Mills had beensteam powered–it never used waterpower.)

Detroit Edison began developing hydroelectric power on the Huron River in 1905. It bought the Washtenaw Light and Power and Mimico generating stations, and over the next few years acquired land and water rights at Osborne and Delhi from Mimico, and at Barton, Foster’s, and Superior from the Cornwells. Edison also bought land and water rights in Dexter, Ypsilanti, and Belleville.

Edison began building or rebuilding dams and powerhouses on the Huron starting in 1912. The original plan called for nine dams, but only five were completed before the program was suspended in 1925. By then, construction costs had risen sharply, while coal-fired power plants were getting bigger and cheaper. Peninsular Paper built the planned dam in Ypsilanti, and the Ford Motor Company constructed the one in Belleville, but the area would certainly look different if the dams had gone up at Delhi and Dexter. These would have created enormous impoundments, with Delhi’s stretching up to Dexter and Dexter’s going all the way up into Portage and Base Line lakes.

Once cutting-edge modern factories, today mill sites such as Hudson Mills or Delhi are picturesque ruins. Though walls and foundations of the old mills survive, few realize that there are no naturally occurring rapids at either of these popular parks. The Huron flows over the remains of the dams that powered the county’s first factories.

It’s no coincidence that many mill sites are now parks. The Huron-Clinton Metroparks were originally conceived as an enormous ring of parkland around the whole Detroit metro area, broadly following the path of the Huron and Clinton rivers. Mill properties were right along the rivers; they were abandoned and available. After WWII, the focus shifted to setting up individual parks along the path of the erstwhile parkway. The city’s riverfront parks are the crowning achievement of longtime Ann Arbor Parks superintendent Eli Gallup, who engineered the purchase of 936 acres of river property from Detroit Edison for $250,000 in 1963.

Though no water mills survive in Ann Arbor, Saline has two: Weller’s banquet hall on Michigan Ave., a onetime flour mill, and the Saline Mill on Hartman Rd. Taylor Jacobsen, a native of nearby Lodi Plains, was just beginning his forty-year career as an art teacher in the Saline schools in 1960 when he stumbled across the Saline Mill. He rented the house on the property for a while, and then in the mid-1970s he and his wife, Carlene, bought the mill. Unfortunately, much of the admittedly worn-out old mill equipment was sold for scrap just before they took ownership.

By far, the most complete mill in the county is Parker Mill on Geddes, west of Dixboro. Operated by the Parker family until 1959, the gristmill was sold to the Matthaei family, who in turn sold the mill and twenty-seven acres to the Washtenaw County Parks Commission in 1963 for $165,000–$100,000 less than its market value at the time.

This year, Parker Mill celebrates its fortieth year as a county park. The milling equipment is still operational and can be seen in use every Sunday afternoon in September and October.