Mills stood at the center of early communities because settlers depended on grist mills to turn grain into flour or meal, and other businesses gathered nearby so farmers could handle several errands in one trip. In 1834, Hiram and Joseph Putnam of Jackson County reached Section 35 on the north bank of the Red Cedar River, built a log shanty near a 15 acre Indian planting ground, and established only the second settlement in Ingham County, but after many misfortunes they abandoned the effort and returned to Jackson. In 1839, Oswald B. Williams, James Miles Williams, and Horace B. Williams left New York State, arrived in Detroit, and walked 70 miles to the Putnam shanty on the Red Cedar River. In 1840, their father, Oswald Sr., came from Genesee County, New York, and helped them build a log dam and sawmill on the north side of the river, using logs filled with earth and field stones and a raceway that diverted water into narrow chutes to turn water wheels for hydropower. The mill drew more settlers, and logs cleared from new farms supplied boards for buildings and a profitable business for the Williams brothers. Because settlers then faced a three day trip to Dexter to grind grain, Oswald Williams Sr. went to Detroit in 1842, bought a millstone, and hauled it back by oxen, after which the family built the Red Cedar grist mill on the south side of the river. Oswald and Horace later sold their shares to James and moved away, while James stayed, ran the business, married, and raised a family. He sold the mill to Franklin Lombard in 1855 but remained there until his death on September 8, 1886. In 1845, the first village plat was laid out. Since 1839, the two townships of Williamston and Locke had been known together as Phelpstown in honor of David Phelps, the first settler in Locke Township, but in 1857 the legislature renamed the town Williamstown in honor of the three Williams brothers, and the village was officially incorporated in 1871. Mill ownership later passed through Diggs and Corgill of Detroit, Jonathon B. Taylor of Williamston, Stephen Siegfried, who built a concrete dam, Mead and Fleming, Hamilton M. Bigelow of Williamston, Wagar and Stewart when it was called the Model City Mill in 1899, Stewart and Pfeifle Flour Mills in 1922, and Asa Strait and Son Alfalfa Metal Mill in 1941; by 1931 it was listed as vacant. A mill functioned as a multi story machine in which water power on the ground floor turned wheels or turbines, which drove axles, gears, and machinery on the upper floors; grist mills commonly used multiple millstones, one for each grain type, and until 1890 most flour in America was made with millstones before roller milling systems became more common. The millstones were crucial because proper speed, taper, furrows, and the miller's touch determined the quality of the flour, and the stone Oswald Williams Sr. brought from Detroit was most likely a French millstone made from freshwater quartz quarried near La Ferte-sous-Jouarre in northern France. The only remnant of the last Williamston mill is a 15 foot turbine known as the flume wheel, which stood upright in the mill house by the river and was spun by rapidly moving water concentrated by the spillway to turn a large axle and a 64 inch flywheel that powered the mill's machinery by leather belt. After the mill burned in 1942, a neighboring meat company continued to use the turbine to run a generator for electric power. In operation, grain was lifted to an upper bin, sent by chute to the proper millstone, fed by the miller from a hopper through a shoe into the eye of the runner stone, moved outward through dressed furrows, collected in a wood vat, and then either cleaned by hand or sifted in a boulting machine before the finished flour was directed down wooden chutes into bags.