"[Red Clay Creek] demonstrated for the first time the fully integrated automatic factory"
Eugene Ferguson, historian of technology
In 1782, Oliver Evans (1755-1819), along with his brother Joseph, opened a village store in Maryland. There, dealing with the local milling community, Evans discovered how cumbersome the milling process was. The stone or log mills were quite primitive, requiring hours of hard labor, and the flour produced by them was often contaminated with dirt from the floor. Evans suspected that there was a better way to make flour, and he began to design an automatic flour mill.
The site of Evans's flour mill was in Red Clay Creek, where an old stone mill had been built in 1742. By 1785 the automatic flour mill was in operation. It consisted of a bucket elevator, a belt conveyor, a horizontal conveyor, and S mechanical hopper-boy, which was a rake used for spreading and cooling the flour. The entire process was mechanized and run on either waterpower or gravity. Millers were slow to warm to Evans' invention, but it slowly became obvious that his process would revolutionize flour making.
Evans received patents for his invention in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Hampshire. A national patent law was passed in 1790, and the third awarded national patent went to the automatic flour mill. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson later commissioned Evans to build automatic flour mills at their estates.
