Thanks Danny. That's a great article. This topic caught my interest some time ago and the more I read the more I realize how little I knew about it. The ingenuity of people with available resources has always fascinated me. The diagram in the article showing the mill pond and race is very similar to Hildebrand Mill with the exception that Hildebrand was an undershot wheel. I think Lynch's Mill was overshot. It appears that the livestock powered mills in IT were fairly common.

A "Soldier in the 29th" Texas called a hill near present Muskogee "Grindstone Mountain" which made me wonder if they used the stone for grindstones or maybe it just looked like a grindstone... or maybe there was a mill there. I haven't been able to figure out exactly which hill he was talking about but there are only a couple that fit his description.

William Shorey Coodey had a mill on Bayou Menard on the Ft Gibson-Tahlequah Rd. I presume the location to have been near Woodall Spring and the old Cherokee Agency in the vicintiy where the battle of Bayou Menard was fought. Coodey moved across the Arkansas and established Frozen Rock plantation. Coodey died in the 1840s in Washington. I don't know if the mill existed at the start of the war but there had to be a mill in the proximity of Ft Gibson as this area was "relatively" well populated. There was a mill -- probably livestock powered -- at Tallahassee Mission not far away.