Alewives once ran up Town Brook in immense schools to Billington Sea, as John Pory reported in 1622, leaping even over stone barriers to reach their spawning grounds. At the Sixth Water Privilege along Town Brook, at the outlet of Alms House Pond, Stephen Dean established one of the town's first grist mills for grinding corn about 1632 after receiving permission from the Colony Court to move it closer to town; he operated it until his death in 1633. In 1636, the Colony Court granted John Jenney permission to build a proper mill at this site, and his grist mill, erected by the former Norwich brewer, operated until it was destroyed by fire about 1847. After John Jenney died in 1643, his son Samuel Jenney ran the mill until moving to Dartmouth in 1683, after which the town hired the wheelwright Charles Stockbridge to rebuild it, granting him exclusive rights so long as he kept it in good working order; the mill then operated under the original town contract for more than 213 years. An 1683 agreement between the town and Stockbridge required a waste water course and shared maintenance of a fish ladder so herring could pass the dam into the pond, reflecting the settlement's continuing value of alewives; such ladders remained customary on Town Brook until the nineteenth century, when industrial uses took precedence, and by the early twentieth century alewives were trapped at the brook's mouth and carried overland to Billington Sea until fishways were reintroduced sometime between 1920 and 1940. The site later held a tack manufactory begun by Samuel Loring in 1863, then the Bradford and Kyle Insulated Wire Company from 1905 to 1966; that building was demolished in 1968, and a recreated Jenney Grist Mill now occupies the site. The surrounding area, now Jenney Park, includes Watson's Hill, identified in historical documents as a Patuxet Wampanoag settlement called Cantaugheantiest, meaning planted fields, and likely used as a burial ground in the late pre-contact and early historic periods. Watson's Hill was also the setting for the April 1621 verbal agreement known as the Treaty of Caughtaughcanta, reached between 60 Wampanoag Indians and 30 Pilgrims and regarded here as the first Indian treaty in the New World. Nearby, the town voted in November 1727 to build an Alms House for Plymouth's poor; the first brick Alms House, standing from 1826 to 1969 at the south end of Spring Lane, housed indigent, elderly, and handicapped residents, and the adjacent pond was successively known as Slaughterhouse Pond or Corn Mill Pond, then Poor House Pond, and finally renamed in 1967 as Jenney Pond in honor of John Jenney.