A Mill in 1747

This property, located on Little River at the corner of Park Road and Route 67, is owned by William Emerson and has been the site of a waterpowered mill for some 230 years. The first known reference to the property is when it was sold as a mill in 1747. It is interesting to note that the oldest continuously operating mill in the United States opened its doors for business in 1745. Thus the Emerson property may well be the second oldest operating mill in the nation, having been either a gristmill or a sawmill from 1747 until the death of the most recent mill operator, Joe Montriski, in 1965.
    About 1750, the property and mill were purchased by Captain John Wooster who built and operated a famous old Oxford inn, the Captain John Wooster Tavern.
    The mill has subsequently been owned and operated by Edward Pritchard, Mark Loundsbury, Lillian and Sheldon Church, Edward Hoadley and Joe Montriski. The latter, after purchasing the mill in 1926, built the main part of the structure and converted the then gristmill to a sawmill and added a cider mill capable of producing up to twenty fifty-gallon barrels of cider a day. Many of the homes in the community built since that time used lumber cut on the premises.
    After the Emersons purchased the mill in 1971, they proceeded with a very imaginative conversion of it into a home. Today the house still has many of the original walls, and much of the original sawmill machinery and parts of the mill have been retained. The water that powered turbines to operate the sawmill still runs under the house, past the headgate, down the turbine and out the sluiceway. From the kitchen of the house, the six-foot diameter turbine, with its pulleys and gears, is still visible through the heavy chestnut beams whichsurround it. The Emersons have a very impressive view of the dam and waterfall through the forty-foot wide floor to ceiling windows they built into the far side of the structure.

(The above article is from Early Houses of Oxford, Connecticut, a book available for purchase from the Oxford Historical Society.)