The mill was abandoned in the 1930s and largely demolished afterwards, yet the millrace, the channel that once directed river water to drive the machinery, still carries flowing water today. More unexpectedly, the wheel-pit now houses a turbine connected to a generator, meaning that a site with roots in the early seventeenth century is still, in a modest way, producing power.

The history of milling at Quartertown is considerably older than the nineteenth-century fabric visible on the ground. A historian named Berry identified the site in 1894 as the location of the 'Manor Mills', which were operating at least as far back as the reign of James I, between 1603 and 1625. The Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, one of the earliest systematic land surveys of Ireland, shows two houses at this location, suggesting an established settlement around the mill complex. By 1842, the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was recording it as 'Mallow Flour Mills', a name that reflects its industrial purpose at the height of its activity. The water-course that originally fed the mill was diverted in 1826 to supply a newer mill about 500 metres to the south, a practical decision that likely hastened the older site's decline. The mill manager's house, known as Millbrook, still stands nearby and retains its nineteenth-century appearance. Locally, the site has long been called simply the 'old mills', a name that quietly acknowledges how long people in the area have been aware of something ancient and disused just beyond the riverbank.