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.