The Huron River Mills

The Huron River drops forty-two feet within the city of Ann Arbor. That is not dramatic whitewater. It is something better: reliable, controllable power. The founders understood this immediately.

Within two years of the town's founding, a grist mill was operating on the river. By eighteen twenty-six, the event of the summer was a mill raising along the Huron, neighbors gathering the way they gathered for barn raisings, because a new mill meant the whole county ate better. The social occasion and the economic necessity were inseparable.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the river was doing everything. Grist mills ground grain into flour. Saw mills cut lumber for the buildings going up across Washtenaw County. A woolen mill processed fiber. Paper mills and pulp mills and plaster mills lined the banks of the Huron and its tributaries. More than fifty mill sites operated on the river and its connected streams at the industry's peak.

The Argo Mill, later the Ann Arbor Milling Company, stood near what is now Lowertown. Photographs from the late eighteen hundreds show a substantial industrial operation reflected in the water, smoke rising, wagons loading.

The mills began declining in the early twentieth century. A fire in nineteen-oh-four destroyed the Argo Mill, among other losses. By the nineteen twenties they had mostly disappeared. The milling industry had followed the wheat west, to places with more acres under cultivation. The Huron was left to be a river again rather than a machine.

Today kayakers and canoeists use the same water that ran the mills. Argo Pond, the impoundment created by the old mill dam, is a place people swim and paddle on summer afternoons. The river still drops those forty-two feet. It just does it more quietly now.