This location was once a very busy place. About 1813 a man named William Marsh had a mill on the west side of the road and north of the creek at the head of the Pudding Mill Gulf. It was a carding mill and clothing works. Apparently this place didn't operate very long.

On the east side of the road and north of Puddin Mill Gulf, Alexander Webster built a distillery before 1819. However, it didn't last very long, "as its owner soon boiled himself to death in his own mash tub."

There was a blacksmith shop and a shoe shop, but after a time the settlement lost its industries to Borodino.

Editor's Note: Remnants of the mill can still be seen on Willowdale Rd., near Rt. 174 in the Town of Spafford. For location purposes, Puddin' Mill was next to what is now Marcheterre's.

10 November 1776, Amos Miner was born in Norfolk, Litchfield County, Conn. He came to this area about 1800. He was an inventor and manufactured accelerating wheel-heads that farmers' wives used on their spinning wheels for making woolen yarn. In 1805 he sold this business and moved to Spafford, where he built a factory where he made wheel-heads, wooden pails, half-bushel measures, wooden dowels, window sash, and wooden puaps and other wooden articles.

Miner sold this business after a time and went to the head of a gulf leading into Otisco Lake where he again built a factory and a grist mill. It was called the "Puddin' Mill" because Miner ground Indian meal, used with "pudding and milk," part of the diet of the early settlers.

"The genius of Miner was particularly illustrated by the manner in which he accumulated and applied the power to run his factory at the mill situated at the head of the Pudding Mill Gulf. The mill was so located on the edge of a precipitous rock that the water coming to his mill passed over a series of three overshot wheels, one above another giving him the accumulated power of three wheels instead of one."

Miner was the type of person who seemed to get a challenge out of inventing things. After everything was working well, he tired of it, and so he sold the Pudding Mill, which was a successful venture. He went on to Mottville, then between Elbridge and Jordan. The last heard from was that with $10,000 he left New York state for the far west leaving others to become really wealthy while operating mills that he had built.

Puddin Mill was still operating in 1902. There was a sawmill nearby.

Note: The Oak Hill Road of Otisco was once a stage coach route from Hamilton to Skaneateles with taverns and business places. Clintonville, Vesper and Tully Center were important places, after 1806 until the railroads appeared.

Researched by Mrs. Stanley Patterson (Lois), 1961
Copied by Ceylon E. Russell, 1976.
Used here with permission from Barbara Shoemaker, Spafford Town Historian, 2002.