Mountain Spring Mills, Mill Creek Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 1880s Ledger

Mountain Spring Mills, Mill Creek Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 1880s Ledger. This is a ledger book from Mountain Spring Mills, Mill Creek Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. It is not known who the original owner of this book was but it may have been T. D Cherington who did run the mill at one time. The book starts in April 1885 and ends in Dec 1890. The ledger contains 79 pages of great genealogical and historical information for Mill Creek Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

The Mountain Spring Mills ledger is a day by day record of customers who came to the mill and what products or services they bought. It is a valuable genealogical resource as it covers some of the time period between the 1880 and 1900 census. As the 1890 census is missing any documents from this time period are especially valuable to genealogists.

In addition to listing what people were buying from the mill many entries have other information that may be of interest to the genealogist. Some of the entries contain notations on things about the customer such as death info ( some are listed as widow ) others are listed as having their debt settled by another person. It is possible to learn a great deal about your ancestors from studying the information in a book like this. For example by looking at how much flour your ancestor bought in a year it is possible to get an idea of how many people were living in the household. Or if your ancestor was buying a lot of animal feed you can get some idea of the number of animals they may have had. And of course by looking at the payment info it is possible to get an idea of the financial situation your ancestors may have been in.

I have created an index of names to the Mountain Spring Mills ledger that you can view below. The ledger was very hard to read as the person who wrote it did not have the best penmanship or spelling. In addition many of the names are unfamiliar to me as they seem to be of German origin. I have typed the names exactly as they looked to me. I tried not to guess as I felt this would only confuse matters. I also made no attempt to correct spelling. I suggest you find your name of interest in the table below to see what page it is on, then download the appropriate PDF file (listed under Download the scanned pages).

The original scanned ledger pages are also on file; a full page-by-page transcription has not yet been done.