Savage Mill, Cotton Duck on the Little Patuxent

In the early eighteen hundreds, four Williams brothers, Nathaniel, George, Cumberland, and Amos, built a textile mill at the falls of the Little Patuxent River, backed by Philadelphia financier John Savage, whose name the mill took. By eighteen twenty-five it was producing cotton duck, the heavy canvas used for ships' sails and tents, and employing around two hundred workers, mainly women and children as was standard in the industry.

The complex grew to include a gristmill and sawmill, all running on waterpower. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four. Today the old mill buildings survive as a complex of shops and restaurants, one of the better-preserved nineteenth-century mill complexes in central Maryland, the stone walls and millrace still visible along the river.