Special Collections Acquires a Century of Records From the Millrace Woolen Mill

Halvorsen Library’s Special Collections has acquired the business records of the Millrace Woolen Mill, which ran on water power from the Millrace channel from 1868 until it closed in 1971. Four generations of the Lindahl family, who founded the mill and owned it until it closed, kept the records in the attic of the family home on the Founders Triangle side of the river. They donated them this month.

The collection is about 212 linear feet. It includes:

• Payroll ledgers from 1872 to 1971, recording the name, job and weekly wage of nearly every person the mill employed. At its 1920s peak that was about 180 people, many of them women and teenagers.
• About 1,400 glass-plate and film negatives, including the earliest known photographs of the Millrace headgate and the falls.
• Ninety fabric sample books, still holding swatches of the blankets, mackinaw cloth and uniform wool the mill was known for.
• Correspondence about the 1938 flood, which put six feet of water on the mill floor, and the strike of 1946.

“For anyone who grew up here, there is probably a grandparent or great-grandparent in those payroll books. We have had calls from three families already, before we’ve even unpacked the boxes.”

— Miriam Fosse, university archivist

Processing will take about eighteen months. A grant from the Porter County Historical Society pays for two student archival assistants and for rehousing the glass plates, some of which are cracked. The payroll ledgers will be digitized first, because they are the records the public is most likely to ask for. Fosse expects a searchable index of employee names by fall.

Faculty in history, textiles and apparel design, and environmental science have already asked to use the collection in their teaching. One environmental science course plans to compare the mill’s dye-house records against the oldest sediment cores from the Millrace bed. The mill’s connection to the river is told on the Millrace and Porter River page.

The collection can be used now by appointment in the Special Collections reading room on Level 4 of Halvorsen Library, which is open to anyone. Families with their own mill-related photographs or papers can contact the university archives about donating or lending them for scanning. For the wider history of the town and the school, see history.

Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu