Walk down East Spring Street in Williamsville and there is a large red building sitting on the bank of Ellicott Creek with water moving underneath it. That is the whole point. The Williamsville Water Mill is not a replica, not a facade bolted onto a strip plaza, and not a museum built to look like a mill. It is the building, on the raceway, in the spot where the water was first put to work.
What the National Register actually listed
The Williamsville Water Mill Complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 22, 1983, reference number 83001675. The listing covers 56 and 60 Spring Street (the mill, the dam, and the water channels that tie them together), and the stated reason for it is the useful part. It is a rare surviving example of a water-powered seat of local industry in Western New York. Dozens of towns out here were built on falling water. Almost none of them still have the building that did the work.
Nobody agrees on the birthday
Here is an honest problem, and it is better stated than papered over: the sources conflict on when the mill went up.
One line of accounts, the one that follows the National Register file, has a sawmill built on the site in 1801 and substantially enlarged in 1827 by Oziel Smith, the same Oziel Smith who worked the local limestone quarries and put up the stagecoach tavern that is now the Eagle House. The other line credits Jonas Williams with building the mill in 1811, and that version has the Village of Williamsville's own history page, the state marker on the mill porch, and the business operating inside the building today. The marker adds the detail that reconciles most of it: Williams's mill replaced an earlier sawmill that had burned.
So: a sawmill around 1801, a fire, a Jonas Williams mill in 1811, a serious enlargement in 1827. Built in the early 1800s is the phrasing that survives contact with all of the evidence. 1811 is the date the village puts on its own letterhead.
The raceway is half the machine
Williams's mill turned a twelve-foot overshot wheel fed by a raceway that tapped a stone dam upstream. That is the part visitors walk past. The building is only the visible half of the machine; the channel is the other half, and it is cut into the ground for a long way before it ever reaches the mill. In 1841 the raceway work was carried out far enough to divert Ellicott Creek water to the mills along Main Street, the same project that left Williamsville with Island Park. Stand in Glen Park and look upstream and you are looking at the intake end of a two-hundred-year-old power system that still holds water.
Sawdust, cement, buckwheat, cider, ice cream
The building lasted because it never got attached to one job. Milling continued on the site until 1903. Along the way the Water-Lime Works and the Williamsville Cement Company mills operated here, grinding local limestone into natural cement during the Erie Canal era, and were later converted into gristmills. Benjamin Miller bought the property in 1866 and ran it as the Williamsville Cement Works; his son Edward converted it to Eclipse Mills in 1887 and ground pure buckwheat flour.
In 1908 the wooden wheel came out, a 100-horsepower water turbine went in, and the mill turned to apple cider. Daniel and Grace Niederlander bought it in 1947 and ran seasonal cider and a gift shop out of it until 2003. The Village of Williamsville itself held the deed through the mid-2000s, after the mill sat on the market without a buyer. Since 2014 it has been home to Sweet Jenny's, which makes ice cream and chocolate inside it, in view of the windows.
Sawmill, cement mill, buckwheat flour, cider press, ice cream shop. Five unrelated industries, one set of walls, one creek.
Go look at it
The mill is at the bottom of the hill, two minutes off Main Street, and the best view is from the Glen Park side where the building and the water read as one object. October is the correct month. If it's the water itself you're after rather than the building, Glen Falls is right there; for how a creek crossing turned into a town, there's the Mill Village. Everything else in the region is laid out in the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it
The Williamsville Water Mill tee puts the building on a shirt, which is the right order of operations. The mill was the reason for the town, not a souvenir of it. It's part of the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt. Wear it in the village and somebody will tell you about buying cider out of that building. They are probably telling the truth.