(41) Northwest corner of Main and Front Streets

NW corner Main and Front"This is known as the Hobart Mill site. Here George Earle, who had come from England to the Liverpool area, built a grist mill, damming Deep River to form Lake George. He moved his interests to the Hobart locale including the federal post office. Liverpool is in the western part of Hobart and part of it north in Hobart Township. The mill passed through a number of ownerships. In the 1880s William Ballantyne owned it and other owners were Roper and Brown, Frank Brown, and Lake County Co-op. After the mill burned in 1953, the Gary National Bank (66 Main St.) bought the property and built a branch office. A plaque memorializes the site."

Images (links open in a new window):
♦ The old mill on a postcard postmarked 1908.
♦ Cows grazing near the old mill in 1909.
♦ A set of undated images of the old mill, ranging (as best I can judge) from near the turn of the century to perhaps the early 1950s.
♦ A then-and-now post with a circa-1939 view of the old mill.
♦ The mill circa 1940 and 1945.
♦ The mill and its associated buildings circa 1947, when it was owned by the Lake County Farm Bureau Co-op; and here you will find a few details about the mill buildings, by someone who worked there in the 1940s.
This picture of the "old mill" ran in a newspaper shortly before the opening of Hobart's centennial festivities in 1947.
♦ In this view of the dam from Lake George (postcard postmarked 1949), the mill building is at the right edge of the picture, partially cut off.
♦ The still-smoldering ruins of the old mill in February 1953, and a commemorative postcard printed the same year.
♦ Two photos of the construction of the Gary National Bank at 66 Main circa 1954: looking north from Front Street and looking east toward Main Street.
♦ The Gary National Bank in 1965; inside the bank in 1975.

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