The steep fall of the Clinch River as it winds through Cedar Bluff made the community an ideal location for water-powered mills and shaped the town's economy for the next century. Mills had been operating in Cedar Bluff since at least 1842, when a property deed mentioned a mill dam in the river. The Clinch Valley Mill, reflected in the town seal and still standing alongside the river, began as a grist mill where people brought grain to be ground between large millstones, and travelers coming long distances could stay overnight in a lodging room beside the mill's store. In the 1850s, around the time the Old Kentucky Turnpike was built, the mill added a sawmill with a planing mill to finish wood into specific patterns and furniture parts, a furniture shop to assemble them, and a store to sell the completed pieces. After the railroad arrived in 1889, the grist mill expanded from a small custom operation into a larger commercial flour business, replacing French mill stones with steel rollers and a flour packer, and Cedar Bluff flour soon reached kitchens in eastern cities. The McGuire Mill was perhaps the oldest of Cedar Bluff's early mills, and the remains of its dam are still visible upstream in the river. Just after the Civil War, the first woolen mill opened in Cedar Bluff to card raw wool and spin it into yarn for knitting or weaving into cloth, later becoming the Cedar Bluff Woolen Mill.