An 80-plus-year-old bridge over Muncy Creek, at the junction of Routes 405 and 442, is being demolished, and construction workers have been asked to be on the lookout for remnants of a Colonial-era grist mill.

Among the artifacts being sought are the original burr stones from the mill, which was a log structure and the first mill of its kind in the county.

The stones, which would date from the 1700s, and bricks from a five-story mill built at the same site in the 1800s, were used as fill when the current bridge was built in the 1920s to replace a wooden covered bridge.

The original mill was constructed in 1772 at the approach to the creek about where a convenience store-gas station complex now is located.

Any artifacts uncovered during demolition will be turned over to Oliver Sones, who has developed a passion for tracking down the area’s history and collecting artifacts connected with the work and home life of everyday residents from the 1700s through the mid-20th century.

Sones has thousands of artifacts in what arguably could be the most unique museum in the county — Sones’ Farm and Home Museum, in a large remodeled barn on Industrial Park Road just off John Brady Drive.

There are hundreds of tools used by working people and housewives; dozens of vehicles, among them a 1903 postal sleigh made and used in the area; a replica of a country store; working antique farm equipment and household appliances, and rare documents, including letters from the wealthy Wallis family to the English king during the colonial times and 19th-century county documents.

Sones already has been given half of one grinding stone recovered at the site by employees of Hawbaker Construction, which is building the new five-lane bridge and will demolish the older structure now that two lanes of the new span are ready.

He is optimistic the demolition will turn up the artifacts he believes to be buried at the site.

“We expect to get whole (grinding stones),” Sones said.

Those stones date from the original log mill built by John Alwood and later sold to Henry Shoemaker, whose family would own the site well into the next century.

Prior to fleeing the area during the Great Runaway of 1779, Shoemaker dismantled and buried his mill’s gears and stones and — after the English and American Indian forces withdrew from the area — returned, dug up the mill parts and rebuilt his log mill.

The old West Branch Magazine published a story in its March 1924 edition that includes details of the mill, which was located on land that had been a traditional American Indian camping area.

“With construction of this new bridge, another of the valley’s oldest and best known landmarks has slipped forever ‘down the back entry of time,’ ” wrote Thomas Wood in the 1924 article.

He goes on to describe how the western approach to the bridge crossed the site of the mill site and notes how the first mill was built by Alwood so early in the area’s occupation by white European settlers that no record could be found of Alwood selling the property to Shoemaker.

In 1836, then-owner Jacob Shoemaker put up the brick mill on the same site. It remained in operation for 75 years.

According to Wood, the land around the mill was a traditional camping area for American Indians, including two nearby islands in the creek, and his article described the area as containing many graves. Those graves spooked the newcomers and developed “such a fearsome reputation among the children of the neighborhood that they stayed very close to their homes after nightfall, lest they meet the prowling ghost of some long-dead Indian.”

The mill stayed in the Shoemaker family for generations before being acquired by Horace Levan. It was during his ownership that a company attempted to use the mill’s “waterpower as a source of electric power” — a project, Wood reported, that failed because “the head proved not enough for efficient power generation.”

Over time, the mill fell into disrepair, and its dam was destroyed by flooding. The property again was sold and the mill dismantled.

Among the new owners, the author admitted, was himself.

“I hesitate to confess that I was one of those purchasers who laid impious hands upon so ancient and honorable a landmark,” he wrote. “Its machines were junked, its timbers and bricks scattered to a hundred uses.”

The last remnants of the mill, including the burr stones and its foundation, ultimately were used as fill for the bridge built in the 1920s.

Wood includes an additional piece of information, reporting how, before the mill was completely “wrecked,” a stranger stopped by and selected “fine, clear hemlock joists” from among the discarded timbers.

When asked the reason, the stranger explained the wood was to be used “in violin manufacture” and it was rare to find “such fine and long-seasoned lumber.”

The bridge being replaced cost about $40,000 to build in the 1920s. The new bridge will cost $6 million, according to PennDOT, but that includes extra lanes to accommodate the flow of traffic onto the routes that insect near the bridge, curbing and elevation of the roadway in the area above flood stage.

For the record, the covered, wooden 19th-century structure that the 20th-century bridge replaced cost a mere $1,400, according to Wood.

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