For about 200 years after the first Europeans arrived, settlements had to be self-supporting, producing food, clothing, and shelter locally and relying on small industries along rivers and streams to process essential raw materials such as grain, timber, and hand-woven woolen cloth. The Perryopolis pre-industrial complex is one of the only original pre-industrial sites remaining in the country. Its development began just before the War for Independence, when George Washington instructed his overseer, Gilbert Simpson, to construct a grist mill on lands he had purchased in 1769 after land in Western Pennsylvania became available for settlement. Milling operations began in 1776 and continued until 1918. A distillery beside the grist mill was built about 1790; on the early frontier, distilleries were crucial because they turned surplus grain into whiskey, the only cash product settlers could exchange for goods they could not make themselves. After the federal government imposed a tax on whiskey in 1791, the Whiskey Rebellion spread across the frontier, with its greatest violence in Western Pennsylvania. The bakery on the site is believed to have been built about 1890; its lower level contains the original stone bake oven, capable of baking up to 200 loaves of bread in a day, while the second floor stored flour and other ingredients and the lean-to held firewood for heating the oven. The bakery is associated with the Smith family, the last owners and operators of the grist mill, and it was reconstructed in 1981. About one-tenth of a mile southwest of the grist mill stands a fulling mill built about 1814, where wool received its final processing into cloth, and archaeological research indicates that a saw mill stood just below it; both mills used a common mill pond and raceway for their operations.
