Graue Mill
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The Graue Mill and Museum, raised in 1852, is the only operating gristmill in Illinois. It is located on Salt Creek in Oak Brook, Illinois. It is owned by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County and operated by a nonprofit preservationist group.
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[edit] History
Miller Friedrich Graue, born in Germany, emigrated to the United States in the late 1840s. Changing his name to 'Frederick', he brought with him knowledge of the craft of waterwheel gristmilling. Settling in what was then the faming village of Fullersburg, Illinois, he filed claim to a tract of damp, clay-rich bottomland along the banks of Salt Creek. Digging ditches in the poorly-drained soil, he and his family recovered clay that could be used to make bricks. The Graues built a kiln on their farmstead, fired the bricks, and slowly raised the new watermill from the on-site building material. The entire task took five years. The mill went into operation in the summer of 1852.[1]
The ditching and draining of the Graue Mill farmstead was typical of German-American settlement patterns in the Midwest in the 1840s and 1850s, as the thrifty German emigrants found assets in tracts of land that had been left behind by earlier, English-speaking frontiersmen and women.
Frederick Graue could not build his entire mill from onsite materials. He bought four buhrstones that turned on water-driven axles to grind locally grown corn and wheat. Quarried in France, the buhrstones were carefully dressed by specially trained craftsmen so as to form two level, gritty surfaces that would pulverize the grain between them.[2]
Graue and his family were Pietist Germans who opposed American slavery. The mill is one of three authenticated Illinois stops on the Underground Railroad, the subversive movement that helped fugitive slaves escape from the American South to Canada.[1]
[edit] Today
The Graue Mill operated in eastern DuPage County under three generations of the Graue family for approximately 60 years. In the 1910s, advances in milling technology, particularly the invention of steel rolling mills, drove the old mill out of business. The derelict mill was restored by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1934-1943, and was opened to the public as a working historic site in 1951.[2]
As DuPage County became urbanized in the second half of the 1900s, the mill's surroundings lost their agricultural context. The mill building itself, however, was honored as a survivor from Illinois frontier years. The Graue Mill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and was recognized as an Illinois Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1981. The mill has been periodically re-restored since 1943 to keep it in operating condition, including work completed in 2002.[2]
The Graue Mill is located at 3800 S. York Road, on the banks of Salt Creek in Oak Brook, Illinois.
[edit] References
- ^ a b "Recreation/Entertainment: Graue Mill", Village of Oak Brook, accessed March 13, 2007. [1]
- ^ a b c "History of the Graue Mill and Museum", DuPage Graue Mill Corporation/Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, accessed March 13, 2007. [2]
