Baltic, the central village in Sprague, was once home to one of the largest cotton mills in the Americas. In fact, the town was created, with a piece of Lisbon and a piece of Franklin, to serve the mill.

The mill was 956 feet long, 68 feet wide, and five stories high, dominating the village of one-story houses.

Most of the mill is now gone, half burned in 1999, the rest torn down just this year.

About all that remain are the races used to harness the rush of water to turn a water wheel: the head race, which fed water into the mill, and the tail race, which emerged from within the mill and fed the water back into the Shetucket.

The head race was fed by a reservoir that was backed up by a dam that crossed the river just upstream from the village. The 500-acre reservoir reached miles up the river.

The first dam, framed of wood and filled with stone, was built in the 1850s. It reached 220 feet across the river. It connected to an embankment on the east side that led to the bulkhead of the head race.

The bulkhead, built of granite blocks, and its gates remain on the north side of Route 97. The gates could be raised and lowered to control the flow of water to the mill. The pipe to the turbine also remains at the lower end of the race.

The bulkhead gates were almost always open. Another set of gates, closer to the mill, were opened during the day to provide power to the mill, then closed at night so the reservoir could refill.

The turbine, turned by 1,200 horsepower of water, provided mechanical power to the mill. The turbine turned several leather belts that turned horizontal shafts the went the full length of the mill. These shafts had belts that distributed mechanical energy and activated the mill’s 1,973 looms and 76,000 spindles.

In 1876, a spring freshet damaged the dam and broke through the bulkhead, overflowed the channel, and washed away some 90 feet of the mill. The dam held but had to be rebuilt.

The new dam was made of timbers bolted together with iron, forming cribs filled with stone. It was 515 feet long, 80 feet wide at the river bottom, and four feet wide along the top.

That first mill burned in 1887. In 1892, Ponemah Mills of Taftville — today a magnificent apartment complex on Route 97 — bought the Baltic mill site and built a new mill. The head race was widened to provide enough water to generate electricity. The electricity powered not just the mill but the village.

The new dam broke in 1955 when Hurricane Diane happened to hit while the dam was being repaired. Since electricity was coming from other sources, the dam had no economic purpose. It provided recreation to the town — fishing, boating, horse races on the ice — but it was not worth replacing.

The mill stopped operations in 1967, and in 1999, the abandoned building burned.

With the dam gone, the pond’s gone and the river is lower than it was. The head race that remains today is one of few in the country that is above water. The race was partially filled in before Sprague Historical Society asked that it be preserved as a last bit of its history of waterpower.

Glenn Cheney lives in Hanover.