An even earlier industrial site

According to Mitchell's Centre County: From its earliest settlement to the year 1915, Thomas Gordon arrived in Centre County in 1787 and settled "just south of Buffalo Run and west of Spring Creek" where he built a sawmill.  Dicknupp says that in fact Gordon bought the mill from William Lamb who had built it in 1782.  But then it is also said that Lamb's mill was in fact built by Joseph McGraw and sold to Lamb in 1783 (and Rootsweb gives the sale date to Gordon as 28 Feb. 1787)...  and if you read a recent issue of Bellefonte Secrets, the land transfers are hardly perfectly clear.  So the hunt for the origins goes on...

Buffalo Run is not much of a stream, though one could get low head to run a small mill.  Spring Creek, though, is both a high-flow stream fed by numerous reliable springs, and also has a pretty good elevation drop from the Spring Creek Canyon through Bellefonte and on to Milesburg, and if Gordon's mill is Lamb's/McGraw's Red Mill (though that may be over in Potter's Mills...), it stood on Spring Creek just above the confluence with Buffalo Run where the Spring Creek tumbles down a swift channel (now a kayak practice run) that could power an impressive sawmill.  As a side note, this was also where a locks 2 and 3 for the Bald Eagle and Spring Creek Navigation Co.'s canal were built in the 1850s, though those, too, are long gone.

The Industrial Origins of Centre County

My colleague Darryl, out of the blue, emailed me to ask where Houser's mill was.  Never thought about it, I thought... presumably in Houserville on Mill Street (seemed like a reasonable guess; nothing at all about this on Wikipedia).  I never did find out why he asked this, but he pointed out that Jacob Houser built his mill in about 1786-7, which is nearly a decade before Philip Benner arrived to build the iron furnace and mill downstream at Rock.  So inadvertently, Darryl did me the honor of pointing out that this may in fact be one of the earliest industrial sites in Centre County (or at least in Happy Valley).  The 1861 map of the county shows his grist mill in the center of town, though I don't know for sure that it had not been rebuilt by then.  There is also a woolen mill almost unreadable under the township boundary coloring which was also Houser's, but that presumably followed the grist mill.

Looking at a current Gmap, it is pretty obvious that Spring Creek was considerably modified in that SW-NE run by Houserville, and Mill St. (on the left) is at the top of the run, so presumably one of the channels below was the outflow from the grist mill that powered other mills over time.  Today, Houserville is a quiet little sattelite residential town that is an isolated pocket of calm engulfed by the greater State College area.  I'll try to go take a picture of where the mill(s) must have been in a while.