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Gilbert Stuart, one of America's finest eighteenth-century portrait painters, was born in this gambrel-roofed mill in 1755. Although milling had taken place on this site since the seventeenth century, Stuart's father had emigrated from Scotland to establish New England's first snuff mill. No doubt Norman Isham was attracted to its restoration by the beauty of its decaying antiquity, made more picturesque by its siting in a deep hollow. Surely prettier than its reality, this conjunction of the water-powered mill and the miller's quarters nevertheless makes vivid the earliest stage of rural industry.