Many of the ponds in the Trap Pond area, including Trap Pond, were created in the late 1700s when the earliest dams were built to provide waterpower for ironworks that used bog ore from the swamps; the waterpower ran furnace bellows, and blacksmiths forged the iron into tools and other useful items. By the 1800s, agriculture and timber cutting replaced ironworking, and former iron mills were converted to grinding grain and sawing lumber, with additional sawmills, gristmills, and ponds appearing as demand grew. At the start of the 20th century, the old forests were nearly exhausted and farmers shifted from grain to fruit and vegetables, leaving little to grind or saw, so the mills began to close. The mill at Trap Pond, built around 1790, closed in 1920, and in 1933 a flood washed out its dam and several others in the area; a few years later the Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt the dam and helped turn the land into the recreational area now known as Trap Pond State Park. Other mill sites in the area included Big Mills on Little Creek between Laurel and Portsville, a lumber mill that employed ten men, produced 5,000 feet of lumber a day, and was later converted into a crate and basket factory and a tannery; Horsey's Pond near Laurel, where a gristmill that also served as a crate and basket factory closed in 1920 and where the Fish & Wildlife Commission maintains a boat ramp; Laurel Flour Mills on Records Pond, built before 1790, once owned by Nathaniel Mitchell, one of Delaware's first governors, later the state's largest mill complex, and destroyed by fire in the 1960s; Chipman Mill on Chipman Pond near Laurel, where two mill buildings operated seasonally as a sawmill, gristmill, or carding mill until 1948; Old Forge, a site with a forge, later a sawmill and gristmill, several houses, and a thriving village possibly among the area's earliest town sites, powered by now-vanished Forge Pond and still marked by bits of slag; Trossum Pond, which supported a sawmill and gristmill during and after the colonial period; and Raccoon Pond, formerly Davis Pond, which powered a gristmill and sawmill southeast of and adjacent to Trap Pond.