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.
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.
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