Downingtown’s origins are of a small village located midway between Philadelphia and Lancaster. The village was first known as Milltown since it was the location of the last mills on the edge of the unsettled western frontier. Thomas Moore erected ‘a water corn mill’ in 1716 and Roger Hunt established a grist mill in 1739. The deteriorated structure of the Roger Hunt mill and mill race still survives in Downingtown to this day, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. In 1761, John Downing opened a tavern on the east side of the Brandywine Creek which was first known as the Downing Mill Inn; not long thereafter, his father, Thomas, developed an industrial complex of mills on the Lancaster Road in Milltown.