Goose Creek, a Potomac River tributary, runs for 54 miles through Fauquier and then Loudoun County. A particularly lovely stream, it is now primarily used for fishing and to raise the price of homes which are fortunate enough to be constructed adjacent to its banks.
But in the 19th century, when Loudoun County along with its Maryland neighbors, was the breadbasket of the world, the County was the sight of numerous mills. According to one source by 1854 there were 77 mills in operation, grist mills, sawmills and fulling mills. Fortuitously, the ruins of some of these mills can still be found. A few weeks ago, I ran into one of these ruins, Cooke’s Mill, which is a short walk from Wegmans supermarket, across Cochran Mill Road from the Luck Stone Quarry.
The original mill was built sometime in the early 18th century and was purchased by John Hough on November 19, 1761 who bequeathed it to his son. During this time, it was called Hough’s Mill. George Washington, in his March 13, 1771 diary entry writes, “Reachd home, after being obliged to Ferry over goose Creek at Hough’s Mill…” Washington’s original intention was to cross Goose Creek where the Route 7 bridge now stands. On this particular day, March 13, 1771, Goose Creek was swollen and uncrossable because of “spring freshets.” (A “freshet” is a wonderful word for the rise in water level of a river or stream. It is a word which one never hears nowadays and which, I think, should be revived.) Anyway, these freshets forced Washington to cross Goose Creek up-stream at Hough’s Mill.
The mill was purchased in 1807 by Dr. Stephen Cooke a well-known Philadelphia surgeon. Dr. Cooke was a graduate of Princeton University in 1773 and studied at the Philadelphia College of Medicine. He was also a Revolutionary War veteran having served at the battle of Fort Moultrie in 1776. Dr. Cook had three sons two of whom were quite successful.
The oldest, John Esten Cooke studied medicine as an apprentice to his father and earned his MD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1805. He is the author of the thousand-page “Treatise on Pathology and Therapeutics”; was a professor at Transylvania University in Lexington Kentucky; and was the inventor of the very popular Cooke’s Pills which consisted of aloe, rhubarb and, importantly, calomel which is mercurous chloride, a powerful laxative. His general recommendations for curing diseases were bleeding and purging, probably via Cooke’s Pills.
The middle son was writer George Cooke, apparently famous in his day but for whom I could find no further information. The third son was John Rogers Cooke who was given the mill by his father. John took ownership on July 7, 1810, and it is from his ownership that we receive the current name of Cooke’s Mill. He held on to it until 1819 and after that it exchanged hands quite often but maintained the name of Cooke’s Mill to this day.
In the 1830’s an attempt was made to connect Cooke’s mill and the other mills along Goose Creek to a canal (Goose Creek Canal) which would facilitate moving grain from the mills to the Potomac River. From here the canal boats would be poled across the river and into the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O Canal) on the Maryland side where a special lock had been constructed to allow access to the canal from the river. Once the boat entered the C&O canal the ports of Georgetown and Alexandria were less than a day away.
Even though the Goose Creek Canal was never a success, it has left behind a canal prism, dams and locks which are visible today and stir the imagination of any historian or archeologist.
Mills were generally three stories high with the lower story being constructed of stone and the upper two of wood. This is why canal ruins usually consist only of the lower stone story which can outlast hundreds of years of weather. Cooke’s mill is no exception, and the close observer can see two kinds of stonework indicating two different periods of construction.
The ruins of a dam across the Creek downstream, is also evident and interestingly, there is another dam ruin about 400 feet upstream. The purpose of a dam, of course, was to raise the water level to fill the mill race which provided water to turn the mill’s water wheel generating between nine and fifteen horse-power depending on the flow of water. Later canal locks were added to the mill which are still standing.
Curiously, there is also a section which consists of 20th century concrete reenforced by steel rebar. I could not explain this, so I decided to go to Leesburg’s Thomas Balch Library. There, I found a manuscript “Mills and Mill Ruins in Loudoun County Virginia” by Marjorie Lundegard published in 2002. Also helpful was Eugene Scheel’s “Loudoun Discovered Volume II.” These two very useful works solved the mystery of the modern concrete.
In 1902 Cooke’s Mill, now owned by Robert Mavin but abandoned, was sold for $5,000 to John W. Blitzer, Samuel T. Hickman and Wallace George. Blitzer was the mayor of Leesburg, VA. These three were front men for the Leesburg Electric Company to whom they sold the mill for $16,500 in company stock the following year.
The unused mill was then converted to electrical generation with a dynamo and turbine attached to the water wheel. Thus, Leesburg was electrified in the opening years of the 20th century. To ensure continued electric generation when the Creek ran dry, a backup steam engine was also installed. The Leesburg Electric Company sold the mill to Virginia Public service Company in 1929 who retired it in 1937.
The Ruins of Cooke’s mill record over 200 years of Loudoun County and American history. From its early days as a mill serving local farmers’ need for flour and wood in the 18th century, to a mill which fed the world in the 19th century, it ended its life in respectable retirement, after generating electricity for the burgeoning community of Leesburg, Virginia which 100 years later would become the center international communications and the home of the internet.
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If you enjoyed this essay, you might want to purchase my 2023 book: “Potomac Marble: The History of the Search for the Ideal Stone” available at all on-line sites.
Paul Kreingold
Leesburg, VA
Copyright 2025
Appendix: Here are two mill poems, one joyous and the other sad and sentimental. I rather like them both.
The Miller Of Dee
Charles Mackay – 1814-1889
There dwelt a miller, hale and bold,
Beside the river Dee;
He worked and sang from morn till night –
No lark more blithe than he;
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be:
“I envy nobody – no, not I –
And nobody envies me!”
“Thou’rt wrong, my friend,” said good King Hal,
“As wrong as wrong can be;
For could my heart be light as thine,
I’d gladly change with thee.
And tell me now, what makes thee sing,
With voice so loud and free,
While I am sad, though I am king,
Beside the river Dee?”
The miller smiled and doffed his cap,
“I earn my bread,” quoth he;
“I love my wife, I love my friend,
I love my children three;
I owe no penny I can not pay,
I thank the river Dee,
That turns the mill that grinds the corn
That feeds my babes and me.”
“Good friend,” said Hall, and sighed the while,
“Farewell, and happy be;
But say no more, if thou’dst be true,
That no one envies thee;
Thy mealy cap is worth my crown,
Thy mill my kingdom’s fee;
Such men as thou are England’s boast,
O miller of the Dee!
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Songs: The Old Mill
Thomas Dunn English (1819-1092)
Here from the brow of the hill I look,
Through a lattice of boughs and leaves,
On the old gray mill with its gambrel roof,
And the moss on its rotting eaves.
I hear the clatter that jars its walls,
And the rushing water’s sound,
And I see the black floats rise and fall
As the wheel goes slowly round.
I rode there often when I was young,
With my grist on the horse before,
And talked with Nelly, the miller’s girl,
As I waited my turn at the door;
And while she tossed her ringlets brown,
And flirted and chatted so free,
The wheel might stop or the wheel might go,
It was all the same to me.
’T is twenty years since last I stood
On the spot where I stand to-day,
And Nelly is wed, and the miller is dead,
And the mill and I are gray.
But both, till we fall into ruin and wreck,
To our fortune of toil are bound;
And the man goes, and the stream flows,
And the wheel moves slowly round.
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