At this corner in Rockville, where the Hockanum River dropped forty-four feet at the steepest of the village's waterfalls, three mills rose on ground that had been wilderness in the late 1700s. The first building on the site was one of Connecticut's earliest paper mills, built in 1833 by Colonel Francis McLean, a leading figure in Rockville's early industrial development; it made paper from rags for books and news journals before fire destroyed it in the 1860s. The manufacturing complex that followed was created through the efforts of Albert Dart, a local blacksmith who bought the property in 1862 and spent seven years reshaping the ravine, building dams, and erecting three textile mills supplied by a feeder canal and short headraces, each large enough to employ about 100 workers. The first of these, later known as Daniels Warehouse, was sold in June 1864 to Julius Rich's Carlisle Company for the manufacture of cotton sewing thread, then passed after the panic of 1873 to Samuel Fitch, who produced stockinet, and later to the J.J. Regan Company and the Hockanum Mill Company before textile manufacturing there ended in 1951. Dart's second mill, across Grove Street, was sold in 1866 to Ebenezer Kellogg Rose for silk thread production; after the Rose Silk Manufacturing Company failed, the Belding Brothers Company bought the mill and machinery in 1870 for $41,000 and operated a silk-thread mill there, after which the property passed to the Keeneys of Somersville and then to the American Dyeing Corporation, known today as Amerbelle Corporation, the only remaining textile-processing company in Rockville. Dart's third project, the stone mill built in 1868, stood five stories high with two three-story wings and used a fifty-five-foot waterwheel said to be the largest in the country at the time, providing 150 horsepower; its great cost drove Dart into bankruptcy, and after his death in 1882 the mill passed to Cyrus White, the White Manufacturing Company, the J.J. Regan Company, and ultimately Amerbelle.