Eno River: Thirty Mills and the Fight to Save a Valley
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
More than thirty mills once lined this river, grist mills, sawmills, the infrastructure of a pre-industrial piedmont economy. Settlers arrived in the mid seventeen hundreds, and the Eno, Shakori, and Occoneechee peoples had lived along the water long before that. By the nineteen forties the last mill had gone quiet.
The river nearly disappeared entirely in nineteen sixty-five when Durham proposed flooding the valley for a reservoir. A group of residents pushed back, formed the Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley, and spent years lobbying Raleigh. In nineteen seventy-three North Carolina approved the park idea. Durham withdrew its reservoir plan. The park opened in nineteen seventy-five with over a thousand acres. Today you can still find the Guess Mill Dam and the chimney ruins that mark where the old mills stood, remnants of an industrial past preserved inside what was almost a lake.
