Ascutney Mill Dam

On Mill Brook just above Windsor, Vermont, the Ascutney Mill Dam has been holding back water since the early eighteen hundreds. The current masonry structure dates to around eighteen thirty-four and powered a succession of mills that made Windsor one of the more industrialized towns in rural Vermont. Windsor was already famous for the precision tool industry, and waterpower from this dam helped feed that tradition.

The American Precision Museum, which now occupies a former gun factory a short distance downstream, owes its origin to the same river energy. The dam is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a rare intact example of early nineteenth-century New England mill-dam construction, a quiet stone threshold where Vermont's agricultural economy crossed into its industrial one.