James H. Audrain (1781-1830), a War of 1812 veteran, Missouri legislator, and namesake of Audrain County, lived in present-day O'Fallon from 1816 to 1831 on land extending along both sides of present-day Highway P and including Dames Park. Before moving there, he had been a tavern-keeper at St. Louis, an Indian trader at Fort Wayne and Fort Osage, captain of a War of 1812 company of spies, a colonel in the U.S. Rangers, territorial marshal at Detroit, constable of the District of Erie, and sheriff and appraiser of Wayne County, Michigan. In the O'Fallon area he continued in public service as one of three road commissioners appointed in 1819 to lay out a road from St. Charles to the old Boone salt lick in Howard County, as state senator of Missouri's 8th District beginning in 1824 and again in 1830, and as a St. Charles County judge from 1825 to 1826. He and his wife, Mary E. "Polly" Wells Audrain, had at least six children. He built an inn or tavern, a distillery, and a grist mill near what is now the entrance to Dames Park, where Salt River Road, now Highway P, crossed his property on a route used first by American Indians and later by white settlers traveling to make salt. During the War of 1812 in the Detroit area, he served as a soldier and spy, crossed behind enemy lines to visit his family while Detroit was under siege, and later fought with his father-in-law Samuel Wells at the Battle of the Thames under General William Henry Harrison, where Tecumseh was killed. Audrain's unusual ox-powered grist mill, nicknamed Bull's Hell Mill, used oxen walking on a canted tread-wheel to turn the millstones, and after his death his sons continued operating it until it was converted to steam power. His family was closely tied to other frontier families in the area, including the Healds and the Wells, and through those connections to George Rogers Clark, William Clark, and John O'Fallon; together these families played roles in Missouri's path to statehood. Audrain died suddenly on Friday, November 17, 1830, at the St. Louis home of his friend General William Clark.