Early Pioneer Mills

SUP Marker #4-A, located at the S.U.P. Building – see other S.U.P. Markers here.

There were twenty-two mills along Millstream giving this mountain water a name and life surviving function. Gardner, Neff, and Osguthorpe were names of pioneer-constructed mills along Millstream.

The Scottish, Welsh, and English Mormon converts provided needed supplies generated by the mill race water power. The grinding wheels of millstones worked the wheat as the mountains and isolated valleys sustained the people. The water turned wheel was depicted in Dr. Richard Gunn’s artistic conception of the mill.

The East Mill Creek chapter appreciates and honors the mill and our ancestors. Both have passed away and are gone.

The Lesson of the Watermill
Listen to the water-mill
Through the live-long day,
How the clicking of its wheel
Wear the hours away.
Languidly the autumn wind
Stirs the forest leaves,
From the field the reapers sing
Binding up the sheaves.
And a Proverb haunts my mind
And a spell is cast – – –
“The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past.”

From the power of the will
came the strength of the mill
To give life to those who settle
from our ancestral foreordained metal