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Mills’ favor were built along North Front Street and they became known as “North Front families,” the top of Millburgh’s social scale.
    South of Frederick Street, in Dutchtown, the houses that were built by the workers were of red brick instead of gray limestone, huddled closely together on small plots of land, many being built in the row fashion of Philadelphia and Baltimore with no division between them except a common wall.
    John Mills held himself aloft from the rabble of the town. His plantation of over three thousand acres completely surrounded the cliff-edged bowl of Millburgh and, centrally on the rim, so that all of his domain could be seen from his veranda, he built the great mansion of Cliff House. It was started in the spring of 1760 but, according to a legend which the house still stands to verify, the elaborateness of the interior woodwork demanded nine years for its completion. John Mills was one of the richest men in the colonies and he lived on a scale to fit his purse. When he died in 1784, a contemporary account records that more than two hundred house servants and plantation workers followed the casket on foot.
    James Mills, John’s eldest son, carried on in his father’s tradition and continued to expand the factories. Whether through wisdom or good fortune, his greatest expansion was in the lumber business and it was there that he laid the foundation for the high-water mark in Millburgh’s economic history.
    After the War of 1812 the British flooded the American market with ironwork and agricultural implements priced so low that the Millburgh forges and factories could not compete. The lumber business took up the slack. The local timber had long since been cut, most of it to make charcoal for the iron furnaces, but now great rafts of white pine came floating down the river from the upper reaches of the Susquehanna. The Millburgh sawmills were waiting and the town became the center of lumber supply for Philadelphia and all of southeastern Pennsylvania. It was a lusty, rip-roaring, money-coining period. Millburgh had been a boom town since its birth but there had never been anything to match this. On South Front Street, raftmen stood six deep at the tavern bars. On North Front Street, the militia guarded the mansion dwellers from the drunken roistering rivermen who recognized no limits in their quest for port excitement. Every month there were more mansions to guard. New fortunes were being made so fast that the old designation of a “North Front family” had already begun to lose some of its meaning.
    The lumber boom lasted well into the eighteen-thirties. By then the upriver sawmills at Williamsport, Lock Haven, and Renovo began to take the business away and Millburgh’s tide had turned. The iron and steel industry moved West and the farm implement business trailed the ironmasters. The old Mills Plow Company dwindled into insignificance. The tannery closed and the kilns at the brickyard crumbled into ruins.
    The Civil War brought a respite in the city’s declining fortune but, with the Reconstruction years, the downward course continued. Only three local industries of any importance survived the panic of 1873—the Mills Carriage Works, with which no descendant of John Mills was any longer associated, the Mills Iron Foundry, now owned by the Krautz family, and the Everett-English Cotton Mill, which was the lineal inheritor of the weave shed where John Mills had woven the flaxen canvas for his covered wagons.
    The Tredway Furniture Company could not then be listed as an important Millburgh industry but its advertised claim-phrase, “Established 1788,” can be historically justified. Josiah Tredway, a cabinetmaker by trade, came from England in 1766 to carve the decorations on the fireplace mantels of Cliff House and stayed on to make Millburgh his home. In 1788 he opened a shop on the alley behind Cromwell Street between George and Frederick, the