The paragraph below was
taken from an article in the April 2013 National Geographic on Delaware’s
National Park. I know it is focused on the Brandywine but it is too bad the
paragraph does not mention his family’s mill or any other mill along The Red
Clay Creek where he invented and installed his process.
"Yet the du Ponts were, in a sense, late arrivals. It
wasn’t a French aristocrat who launched the industrial revolution along the
Brandywine, but rather a Delaware shoemaker’s son named Oliver Evans, one of
America’s greatest unheralded inventors and the godfather of automated
manufacturing. In the 1780s he created a new system of flour milling that, with
an ingenious arrangement of water-driven wheels, gears, and shafts, almost
removed human labor from the process of turning wheat into flour. Visiting
millers were incredulous to see Evans’s mill grinding busily away as if by
magic, completely unattended, while the owner himself worked placidly in a
nearby field. Soon Evans-style gristmills—for which the inventor received the
third U.S. patent ever granted—were lining both banks of the Brandywine, and
their basic principles were being adapted to manufacture paper, textiles, and
other products. The Brandywine Valley was to automation what Silicon Valley
would later be to micro-processing."
