The earliest activities which could be categorised as manufacturing for sale were byproducts of the pioneers' war on the forests which covered the county. As part of his experiment in granting townships to proprietors such as Thomas Hornor, Benajah Mallory and Thomas Ingersoll in the 1790s, Gov. Simcoe imposed terms which sometimes required construction of saw mills. Thomas Hornor was the first to comply, putting a mill into operation in Blenheim Township by 1795, but his millpond dam collapsed and no immediate attempt was made to rebuild. Efforts in Dorchester Township just to the west of Oxford's boundary by William Reynolds and Seth Putnam were more successful, but production from their saw mills remained on a small scale for many years. A visitor in 1804 described the difficulty faced rafting lumber from those mills down the Thames River nearly 300 kilometres to sell at Detroit – three or four men could deliver 25,000 board feet at a time in this way and bring back goods to sell upon return, but it was a ten- to fourteen-day journey. Export sales were more frequent for potash and pearlash derived from burning timber and boiling the ashes; individual settlers had little wheat to spare in their early years, but plenty of wood ashes that could be boiled and bartered with local merchants in exchange for supplies. Export of sawn lumber eventually became a booming market by the 1840s, increased with the improvement of roads by toll companies, and even more so after the construction of railways through Oxford.