In the eighteen hundreds, Otter Creek's banks at Middlebury Falls were crowded with noisy industry as workers and mill girls made their livings there. The falls provided the waterpower that made the new town a busy industrial center. Sawmills and gristmills were erected in the seventeen eighties to serve settlers eager for boards and bread flour, followed by woolen mills, fulling mills to soften homespun cloth, Vermont's first nail factory, a gun maker, and many other enterprises. The falls soon powered David Page's cotton mill in eighteen twelve, one of the largest and most advanced in the nation, where one hundred looms could make one thousand six hundred yards of cloth a day. In the eighteen twenties, John Deere learned skills as an apprentice in Benjamin Lawrence's Frog Hollow blacksmith shop that would later lead to his famous plow. By the eighteen fifties, Nathan Hand's factory was producing six hundred wooden pails a day. David Page had razed the original saw and gristmills built by town founder Gamaliel Painter and erected a six-story stone cotton mill in their place. The first cloth was produced there during the War of eighteen twelve at a cost of fifty cents a yard, and by the eighteen fifties mass production had lowered the price to around eight cents a yard. A fire destroyed the building in September eighteen fifty-four, and new owners rebuilt it as a flourmill.