Having obtained from the mayor, etc., of New York, in December, 1800, a water grant extending across the creek, just east of the King's Bridge (which reserved, however, a passage-way fifteen ieet wide for small boats and craft), Macomb erected a four-story frame grist-mill extending out over the creek. Its power was supplied by the alternate ebb and flow of the tide against its under-shot wheel. Macomb's extensive real estate ventures proving disastrous, Paparinamin and the mill were sold under foreclosure in 1810, and purchased by his son Robert. By an act of 1813 the latter was authorized to construct a dam across the Harlem from Bussing's to Devoe's Point, and to use the water for milling purposes, and erected at much expense the causeway and bridge known as " Macomb's Dam." Its gates admitted the flood tide from the East River, but obstructed its ebb, thus converting the Upper Harlem into a mill-pond, having its outlets underneath the old mill and through a raceway made on the Westchester side into Spuyten Duyvil Creek at low tide. The race supj)lied power to a marble-sawing mill which stood on a quay between it and the creek, and of which Perkins Nicolls was proprietor. Robert Macomb becoming involved, the property was sold by the sheriff in 1818. Ten years later it was possessed by the " New York Hydraulic Manufacturing and Bridge Company," by which an elaborate plan was put forth for mill-seats and a manufacturing village, based on a report of Professor James Renwick, of Columbia College, approved by Colonel Totten and General Macomb, chief engineers United States army. The enterprise proved abortive.- The old gristmill ' stood idle during many years, and at length was made useless by the removal of Macomb's Dam. In 1830 Mary C. P. Macomb, the wife of Robert, acquired the Paparinamin tract, and during many years uuide the old stone tavern her home, exercising therein a generous hospitality, of which Edgar Allen Poe was a frequent recipient.