I Love This Place

Mills of Muddy Creek

By Colleen Nelson

Muddy Creek loops across the landscape of Carmichaels, winding its way downstream to the Monongahela River, a few hilly miles away. Shelley Anderson is a local historian with a nose for finding what’s left of the past, hidden in graveyards and beneath generations of siding on houses along the old streets of Old Town. These days she is hot on the trail of yet another piece of those forgotten times, when Muddy Creek moved water wheels up and down its banks and helped build a frontier community.

I meet up with Shelley at the Greene Academy to see the Carmichael Area Historical Society’s latest historic acquisition and her excitement is contagious. This, she tells me, pointing to the now vacant yellow-sided house beside the Carmichaels covered bridge, was once a mill. Back at the Academy, we peer at the Caldwells Atlas map of 1876 and see the house listed as a marble shop run by George Washington Daugherty, who carved beautiful bevined tombstones for his neighbors. The 1865 McConnells Map lists it as a school house. Shelley has followed the trail to tax records of 1790 when James Carmichaels was assessed as having a grist mill, a tan yard and two stills, all on the banks of Muddy Creek.

“This fall we’ll clear the weeds and trees away in back. You can see where the stone foundation has a door and you can walk to the creek. It’s going to take a lot of work but…”
Thanks to Shelly’s perseverance, the history of this mill and the land surrounding it has been retraced back to the days when James Carmichaels owned 809 acres of land that would become a settlement, then a village, then a bustling town, making James Carmichaels a possible owner. Records show that James gave land to the vestrymen to build an Episcopal Church in 1790, next door to this gristmill. That fieldstone church would later be added on to and become the Greene Academy, where Shelly and others from the Carmichaels Area Historical Society now do the good work of historic preservation.

But it is “Our Presbyterian Heritage – a history of Presbyterianism in and around Carmichaels” compiled by Dale Hockenberry that tells the even further backstory of colonial politics that brought in the first settlers to grind their grain, mill their timbers, tan their hides and fire up their stills on Muddy Creek.

When the French and their Shawnee allies invaded Penn’s Woods in 1747, they had already established forts and settlements in Ohio and were heading east toward the Monongahela River valley to claim it for France. When English Prime Minister William Pitt got wind of this, he disregarded the land boundaries granted to William Penn and gave all that is now Western Pennsylvania to the colony of Virginia to defend with its standing army. The land was renamed Pittsylvania and Virginia was given the rights of settlement, much to the consternation of Pennsylvania and Maryland. This hotly disputed issue was not resolved until “President Washington’s administration,” Hockenberry notes.

The floodgates of immigration were opened and soldiers would arrive to make tomahawk claims for themselves, even as they engaged the Shawnee and stormed the walls of Fort Duquesne.
Many of those soldiers were Scots Irish and they brought their Presbyterian religion with them as they cleared old indigenous paths and turned them into horse and wagon worthy roads in the western Frontier.

When John and James Carmichaels travelled these roads from North Carolina in 1760, they passed through Redstone Fort, now Brownsville, where the Virginia militia set up a trading post and Presbyterian ministers plied the wilderness for converts.

Once in present day Greene County, they laid claim to 10,000 acres with a promise to occupy and develop it. In 1767 they returned with a small army of friends, relatives, horses, slaves, tools, seeds and livestock to make good their intentions. Their mills allowed these first families to grind grain and take it by flatboat from the village named Lisbon to the Monongahela River by way of Muddy Creek then on to Redstone Fort and points east.

None of the many other mills on Muddy Creek , like John Curl’s mill and the many Horner mills, have survived except in faded photos. Shelly is gathering fthese photos for her next chapter in the history of Carmichaels. Volume One is available at the Academy as is the list for volunteers who are ready to help restore that yellow-sided house back to its glory days when it was possibly James Carmichael’s grist-mill.

When you come to Carmichaels August 17th to 24th for the Coal Show, take a drive through Old Town and see the history that is hiding in plain sight in every old building along Muddy Creek.