Milling began at this location along Paint Branch in the 1720s, and by 1773 a public sale advertisement identified a single geared grist mill with bolting cloth here. In 1793, Peter Kemp built the brick miller’s house and added an automated system of elevators and conveyors to the mill, then known as Kemp Mill. After Dr. Washington Duvall took ownership in 1835 and focused on producing cornmeal and lumber, he replaced the entire milling facility in 1841-1842, building on the original foundation. Franklin A. Piling modernized the mill’s internal technology in 1879 by installing a Poole and Hunt Leffel-type turbine in place of the old water paddle wheel. By 1909, Captain Winfield S. Overton was advertising the property as Valley Mill Farm, offering leghorns, hatching eggs, and dairy products. In 1936, John Brostup photographed the mid-19th century two-and-a-half story mill for the Historic American Buildings Survey, a New Deal project created to record pre-1860s structures before they vanished; among the 154 Maryland properties he documented, fifty-eight were in Montgomery County, and this was the only mill. Already shown in decline and reflecting the fate of many grist mills as households turned to machine-processed white flour from large companies, the mill was dismantled in 1941. Its foundation remains, and archaeology on the property continues to explore daily life at what was once a thriving local enterprise that supplied necessary goods to the surrounding community.