Pioneer farmers were vital to settling the frontier, but so was an enterprising group of skilled businessmen. Pioneer millwrights closely followed the tide of settlement as it moved west, with saw mills and grist mills providing some of the first economic services for new frontier communities.

Pioneer millwrights were an interesting group of fellows. Millwrights had to know a little about an awful lot of things: how to identify the best spots for a dam, how to build a dam and millrace, how to build a mill building, how to build the milling machinery and how to operate the milling business after construction was finished.

In the early days, virtually everything in the mill was made of wood, from the building itself to the machinery the mill building housed. About the only non-wooden items in the earliest mills were the millstones in grist mills and metal saw blades in saw mills.

Two of the county's first millwrights, John Schneider and Ebenezer Morgan, arrived here at about the same time. Schneider came west from New York to Chicago in 1832, and Morgan arrived with his family a year later, also from the Empire State.

Schneider first traveled west from Chicago to Capt. John Naper's settlement on the DuPage River, where he helped Naper build a dam and mill. In 1833, Schneider explored west of the DuPage and found an excellent mill site on the west bank of the Fox River at the mouth of Blackberry Creek. Schneider marked his claim and then went back to help Naper finish his mill.

Morgan claimed land along the small creek that would one day bear his name, located just south of Oswego.

The fall of 1833 saw the arrival of Levi Gorton and Benjamin Phillips from Pennsylvania and John and William Wormley, who walked to the Fox Valley from New York prospecting for likely land. All four men settled near what eventually became Oswego. The contributions of Gorton and the Wormleys to the area's pioneer mill history would be considerable.

By late 1834, Schneider and Morgan both had primitive saw mills in operation, Schneider at his Blackberry Creek location and Morgan on Morgan Creek.

In 1835, the Clark family moved to Kendall County, with brothers Josiah, Joseph, Porter and Merritt settling along the east side of what was called the Little Rock timber in modern Little Rock Township. With Schneider and Morgan sawing lumber for the arriving settlers, Merritt Clark decided that a grist mill to grind flour might be a good venture since the nearest place settlers could get flour ground was at Plainfield.

In 1836, he hired Levi Gorton and William Wormley to help build a dam across the Fox River just north of the brand new village of Hudson – soon to be renamed Oswego. Clark ground flour at his new mill, which was located on the west bank of the river, and then decided settlers might pay to buy some furniture for their new homes.

According to the Rev. E.W. Hicks, Kendall County's earliest historian, Clark added a small chair manufactory at his corn mill. Hicks says Clark made wooden chairs at his mill in 1836, and noted that in 1876 some of them were still in existence and were valued by their owners.

Soon after, Clark apparently sold his business to Levi Gorton and his brother, Darwin, who built a better mill on the site, this one with real millstones and a better dam. William Wormley again helped build the Gortons' dam – something he had helped Clark to do, as well as for Samuel McCarty in Aurora. The Gortons' grist mill began operation in 1837, and probably helped Levi accumulate enough money to build an elegant Greek Revival limestone house on the bluff overlooking his mill and dam. The house still stands on Ill. Route 25 just south of the Oswego Presbyterian Church, although it now sports classical columns added in the 1940s.

The Gortons owned the business until selling to Nathaniel Rising and John Robinson in 1840. Rising and Robinson also expanded, improving the grist mill and adding a store. In 1848, Johnson dropped out of the partnership and Zelotus E. Bell joined Rising to lay out the new village of Troy that encompassed both sides of the dam across the river, just north of Oswego. In 1850, Rising sold Troy and the mills to William Parker, a native of Canada, who carried on the business until water-powered mills became obsolete some 40 years later.

Down near Millbrook in 1837, George B. Hollenback and a Mr. Eldering built a dam across the Fox River, and then cut a millrace into the rock beside the river. They then built both a saw and a grist mill, which were powered by an overshot water wheel, 24 feet in diameter. Hollenback and Eldering sold out after four years, and the mill, after doing good service for settlers in the area, was washed away by a particularly strong spring flood a few years later.

From Montgomery in the north to Millington in the southwest, mills sprouted along the banks of the Fox River in and near Kendall County. Most of the county's creeks also sported mills, with Waubonsie Creek in Oswego also powering, among other things, a broom factory. But the era of water power ended when steam engines became economical sources of power.

Then steam in its turn was made obsolete when the internal combustion engine was perfected. Improved transportation systems meant that flour and lumber could be shipped to the Fox Valley’s towns cheaper than it could be manufactured locally.

Today, we still use products, from lumber to flour, produced in mills, but the mills are far away. For the most part we can no longer see the common products we use on a daily basis being made in our own communities. Although gone and largely forgotten, the legacy of Kendall County's pioneer millwrights lives through the progress they helped fuel.

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