Graue Mill
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Graue Mill in
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Graue Water Mill
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| Location | NW of jct. of Spring and York Rds., Oak Brook, Illinois |
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| Coordinates | 41°49′12″N 87°55′39.5″W / 41.82000°N 87.927639°WCoordinates: 41°49′12″N 87°55′39.5″W / 41.82000°N 87.927639°W |
| Built | 1852 |
| Architect | Graue, Frederick |
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| Added to NRHP | May 12, 1975 |
The Graue Mill is a water-powered grist mill that was originally erected in 1852. Now a museum, it is one of two operating water-powered gristmills in Illinois (the other is the Franklin Creek Grist Mill). It is located on Salt Creek in Oak Brook, Illinois, owned by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County and operated by a nonprofit preservationist group.
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 the farming village and early transportation hub of Fullersburg, Illinois, formerly named Brush Hill, he and William Asche (whose brother-in-law, Henry Fischer, built a wind-powered grist mill in what is now Mount Emblem Cemetery) and then filed claim in 1849 to a tract of damp, clay-rich bottomland along the banks of Salt Creek that was home to a sawmill that burned down the year before. Together they built a new sawmill. They together operated this mill for three years, until Graue decided to engage in the milling business on his own.
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 structure and waterwheel into place from the on-site building materials. The mill went into operation in the summer of 1852.
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.
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