In 1833, Archibald Smith began building a sawmill a short distance east of here where a tributary enters Blacklick Creek, but his work was soon destroyed by what he called the great Fourth of July Flood. Undaunted, he completed the mill the next year and used it to saw lumber from trees felled as he cleared land for cultivation. His son, Dr. Isaac Newton Smith, described it as the first mill on Blacklick Creek and recalled four mills on Blacklick and one each on Sugar Run and Rocky Fork Creeks, which received some of the best oak, butternut, chestnut, and walnut timber in the area. The era of water-powered sawmills in Plain Township lasted from 1833 to around the time of the Civil War, during which settlers exchanged log dwellings for comfortable frame houses. Archibald had moved from New Jersey to Plain Township with members of his family in 1818. With little formal schooling in New Jersey and none in Ohio, he taught himself practical skills. A carpenter by trade, he supervised construction of locks, aqueducts, and bridges on the Ohio and Erie Canal between 1827 and 1833. He built the house at 6320 Kitzmiller Road, a fine example of early craftsmanship, became a self-taught surveyor in 1834, and his surveys of New Albany and Gahanna are still used. His autobiography, written in the 1870s, remains a valuable record of the lives of the area's pioneers.