In Montgomery County's Piedmont region, faster and deeper streams than those of the Coastal Plain powered the county's early industrial age in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mills along the Hawlings River valley turned grain into flour, trees into lumber, and fleece into wool. Near this site, the Brookeville Woolen Mill complex, including the mill and houses for the miller and mill workers, survives as a rare example of a wool mill for making cloth blankets. Although the buildings' dates are uncertain, many small woolen mills were built before the War of 1812, when the U.S. stopped importing wool from Britain, and the mill was certainly standing by 1816, when the Brookeville Woolen Factory was advertised in a Georgetown newspaper. It remained in operation until the early 1900s. Also on the Hawlings River, Greenwood Mill was built around 1840 by Allen Bowie Davis as a saw and gristmill serving the local community. Its miller's cottage may have been built about 1865 and was the home of William Johnson, a former slave and longtime miller and blacksmith. The frame cottage was sided with stones taken from the mill after it was dismantled in 1926 for the widening of Georgia Avenue, and a few stone remains of the mill dam are still visible below the cottage.