Clapp's mill was run in the earliest years by members of the Butters and
Millers families. It may also have been owned by some of the Baldwins-potential relatives
of Loammi Baldwin, engineer and apple farmer.
A chart such as this one was used to calculate power from fall of water.
From Oliver Evans' 1807 edition of The Young Millwright.
William Butters (1630-1692) came from Scotland and settled in the Boggy Meadow
End area of Woburn, which is now Wilmington. His son, William Jr. (1691-1711),
was one of Wilmington's first selectmen, when Wilmington was set off from
Woburn in 1730-the same year Burlington was set off as the Second Parish.
The brother of William Butters, Jr., Samuel (1703-1788), was also one of the
petitioners for a division of Wilmington from Woburn. Samuel Butters may have
been the first member of the Butters' family to operate the mill. George Butters
Genealogical Register notes that Samuel Butters purchased "the interest of Mr.
James Baldwin in lands and saw-mill" and that he carried on the business of a
sawmill in connection with farming, and acquired during his life a large part
of timbered lands, especially the cedar swamps" (3). He married Sarah (b. 1703)
in 1726, the daughter of Abraham and Sarah Jones Jaquith, early settlers in Woburn, Mass.
The land passed to William and Abigail Butters. Their son, James (1745-1838)
inherited that part of the homestead which belonged to his great grandfather-the
farm was just down the road from the Butters' mill. James marched on the Lexington
alarm April 19, 1775 in Capt. Timothy Walker's Company. He married Abigail Butterfield in 1799.
The farm of minuteman James Butters became well-known as the propagation site of
the Baldwin apple (4). A 1826 letter in the New England Farmer tells the story:
"When this apple was first discovered, an old gentlemen of Wilmington, by the name
of Butters, discovered on his farm an apple tree of spontaneous origins, which bore
a fine red apple. The tree was very productive and the apple very much admired and
it was dominated in the neighborhood, the Butter's apple. Afterwards it was called
the 'Woodpecker' because the bird of this name frequented this tree in preference to
others, probably on account of the richness of the flavor of its sap. It has been
called by abbreviation the 'Pecker Apple.'"
The Baldwin apple got its name from Loammi Baldwin (1745-1807), one of New
England's first civil engineers. In the History of Woburn Sewall writes that
Baldwin noticed the apples while "surveying land at a place called Butters' Row,
in Wilmington, near the bounds of that town, Woburn and Burlington." Baldwin "cut
scions for his own orchard, from which originated the name." The claim was further
substantiated by a Massachusetts Horticultural Society investigative committee (5).
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