The Saw-Mill or A Yankee Trick

The Saw-Mill was Micah Hawkins’s masterwork, an American comic opera that was staged at New York’s Chatham Garden Theatre for the first time on November 29, 1824. Hawkins set his opera in Western New York, during the construction of the grand new Erie Canal, and the production’s scenery included horse-drawn canal boats, a cascading waterfall, and a saw mill. There was a total of 28 musical numbers.