Blue Mills — the river hamlet that Spencer's center replaced

Today's Spencer Village is not where Spencer started. The first settlers clustered along a bend in the East Branch of the Black River, at a spot known variously as River Corners, River Mills, Spencer Mills, or Blue Mills. That is where the township's first schoolhouse, first burying ground, first mills, and first Methodist meetings all took place.¹

John P. Marsh from Vermont was the first settler, arriving in 1823. Clarissa Rodgers Marsh (his wife, born in Connecticut) rode from Harrisville on horseback with one child in her arms and another behind her on the same horse.² Later that year Phineas Davis moved into a cabin a man named Rising had built and left empty.

In 1825 Phineas Davis built the township's first grist mill — a log, water-powered mill on the East Branch of the Black River. The millstones were cut from hard local boulders. Perrin's 1881 county history describes the mill as a two-story building that “shook as though it had the palsy” when it was grinding.³

Calvin Spencer built the township's first sawmill in 1833 on the same river, downstream. He'd started digging the dam six months before the mill went up. His grist mill was begun in 1831 and finished in 1836. Both burned in 1879.⁴

Around Blue Mills grew a distillery, a tannery, and a scattering of frame houses. Perrin dryly notes: “One Buck built a distillery near the Spencer Mills... Buck sold out to Sprague, who distilled peas, beans, pumpkins and pumpkin seeds, in fact anything that would foment, into whisky.”⁵

Then settlers began gravitating to the center of the township. Abel Wood and his brother Henry Wood owned the land where the geographic center was. Abel built the first cabin at Centerville in 1832 or 1833. The village that grew up there eventually took the township's Spencer name from the post office. The Blue Mills hamlet faded. It's identifiable today on the modern map by River Corners Road, roughly a mile east of Spencer Village.

The dam is gone. The mill is gone. The distillery is gone. The name Spencer is on the town hall a mile west, on a village that grew up because a small hamlet on the river faded.