Guilford Mill Dam

Richard and Benjamin Warfield patented the land called Wincopin Neck in 1702, and it was re-patented in 1735 to include unclaimed lands along the northern bank of the Little Patuxent River. Shortly after this patent, and by 1744, Alexander, Richard’s son, had a grist mill along the river.

Mills require power to turn to mill wheels that, in turn, rotate mill stones to crush grain into flour.  Grist and other mills in our area are often located along the "fall line" to use the power of the water as it descends in elevation downstream. The water falls created by the hilly Piedmont merging with the Coastal Plain ecoregions powered grist and cotton mills throughout Maryland, including the local Guilford, Simpsonville, and Savage Mills.

The original Guilford Mill dam would have likely been built of stones from around the river similar to their replacements. We don’t know the exact location of the first dam, but it would have been within a few hundred feet of the current one based on the topography and flow of the river.

About 110 feet of the 200 foot Guilford Mill dam built in the early 1800s is intact and on the south side of the Little Patuxent River less than a quarter of mile from the Guilford Quarry Pratt Bridge. It is about 4 feet high on land and almost 6 feet higher than the current water level. There were likely different mill dams built of stone, which was readily available from the river area, but the use of granite blocks would not have occurred until the 1830s when the quarry opened. The mill was quite active in the 1840s after adding a cotton operation to the grist mill.

By 1869, the dam had been operational for a while when Stephen P. Heath, Sr., the new owner of the mill wanted to increase the height of the dam from 4 ft. to 7 ft. The dam must have been raised by 1877 because there was a drowning of a man reported that summer. In the 1880 census of water power in the US (Swain 1882), the Guilford Mill dam was reported to be 200 feet long, 8 feet high, with a race 2,500 feet long, and a utilized fall of 14 feet. While these numbers were estimates, they seem fairly accurate. The race was probably shorter, closer to about 2,000 feet depending on how it was measured, but it was still rather long.

In March 1888, a bad storm washed away part of the dam and the mill started using steam power, presumably by burning coal. In 1890, the mill burned down and the mill dam and race was no longer in use. During a 2017 interview that Clara Gouin (HoCo Rec and Parks) conducted with the son of Lunsford Luckadoo, who lived in the granite house near the bridge, said that the dam was destroyed because it was dangerous in the winter with kids falling through the ice and mosquitoes in the summertime. What remains of the middle of the dam is in the river and the old four foot high 110 foot section on the south bank of the river that is about 180 years old.

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