ANDOVER — This dam is located on Mill Brook just north of the railroad. It dates back to the 1830s. It was made of log cribbing pegged together with iron spikes. Massive stonework supported the mill wheel.  

The mill pond extended upstream from the dam and under the railroad and contained an estimated two to three acres. Originally, it was a saw mill. A grain threshing machine was added about 1860, and a cider mill was added about 1864.  

In the 1900s, a steam boiler was added to augment the unreliable water power. This was probably the cause of the fire that on April 20,1945, destroyed the old landmark.  

Although the mill structures are now gone, the massive granite stonework remains. The brook below the mill became known as Sucker Brook, recognizing that the sucker fish migrating up from Webster Lake were blocked by the mill.  

It is not known who originally constructed this mill but it must have been built before 1836. William Graves, who lived on the next farm down the road, bought a half-interest in the mill from Ruel Long (owner of the mill area) in 1836. Could it be that Graves worked with Long to construct the mill and Long rewarded him with this half-interest?  

In 1837, Long sold to Graves the 15-acre field on the east side of the road with the right to channel the brook across his land. This was apparently to move the brook further south and help dry out the Graves meadow to the north.  Although there is no evidence of the brook ever being re-routed, there is still a trench that can be seen running south of Graves’s stone boundary wall.  

In 1844, Long sold to Graves the remaining half-interest in the mill and 12 acres extending north. William Graves operated the mill for 30 years: 1836 to 1866. In 1866 he sold his farm and the mill to Benjamin Sweatt. Sweatt immediately sold the mill off to Henry Colby.  

Henry Colby built the mill keeper’s cottage (now the Hiller residence) in 1866. He and his wife Caroline (nee Bennet) and their three children lived there until 1874, operating the mill for 8 years. He then sold the mill and moved to the Howard Jelleme place on Emery Road.  Four years later, in 1878, he committed suicide by throwing himself under a railway train below Hogback.

John D. Aiken bought the mill from Henry Colby in 1874 and operated it from 1874 to 1912, a period of 38 years. During this time, he and his wife Lucy Jane (daughter of William Blake Emery of Chase Hill Road) lived in the cottage. 

Lucy Jane was a teacher at Tucker Mountain School. They had no children. John D. Aiken passed it on in 1912.  After several intermediate owners, it came in 1918 to Leland Heath.

On April 19, 1918, the mill keeper’s cottage and barn burned down. Leland Heath immediately “built the pretty little bungalow in which he lived at the time of his death.”  Heath then separated and sold off the mill property to Jay E. Emer who, with his wife Eva (nee Hacket), operated the mill from 1918 to 1942, a period of 24 years. 

During this period, this mill was the only sawmill of a stationary or permanent type that was operating in Andover, except for the Dalphond Mill on Plains Road and the Allen-Rogers Mill in Flaghole. During his ownership, he installed a steam boiler to augment the water power, which was probably the cause of the later loss of the mill to fire. It was bought in 1942 by three partners, executives of the General Electric Company in Lynn, Massachusetts, who operated it under the name of the Andover Lumber Mill.

On April 20, 1945, the old landmark mill was destroyed by fire. Roger Henderson, a nearby neighbor, recalls watching the fire as a young boy from the porch of the cottage, which was an impressive conflagration. After the fire, much of the dam cribbing was pulled apart to allow the brook to flow freely. Perley Henderson, Roger’s father, told of doing this with his team and nearly getting the horses mired in the quicksand in the bottom of the mill pond.