Benajah Cook and other families who settled in Harlem Township, Delaware County, created a community of productive farms. Benajah and Cassandra Cook arrived when the land was still forested and settled on 500 acres of the 4,000 acres Benajah had purchased at a sheriff’s auction on June 12, 1807. On the Cook farmstead, Benajah operated a sawmill whose last visible vestige is the millrace along the north side of Duncan Run near the Gorsuch Road Bridge. Upstream from the millrace are traces of the foundation for a dam or wooden weir built across Duncan Run. At times of high water, logs were floated down Duncan Run and stored in the mill pond, then sorted and moved single file along the race to the sawmill. The millrace both carried the logs and turned the mill wheel that powered the saw’s up-and-down motion. The lumber was used primarily for construction on local farms, and the cleared land became farm fields. The Cook farmstead was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.