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Hinsdale Magazine | History Encore
BY MIKE ELLIS
he Greater Hinsdale area is sprinkled with historical anecdotes recent and distant, and the legend that Graue Mill was once a station along the Underground Railroad is among the most fascinating.
The Mill
Located at York and Spring Roads in Oak Brook, Graue Mill dates to the middle of the 19th Century. German immigrant Fredrick Graue came to Fullersburg, Ill., named after Benjamin Fuller, the forefather of Hinsdale’s Fuller family, in 1842, and built a gristmill at that site about a decade later. Graue Mill Executive Director Leslie Goddard said that in those days, a gristmill was a vital element in pioneer communities. “You needed a place where people would go to bring the flour that they were growing,” Goddard said. “The corn, the buckwheat—anything they needed ground into flour, they could bring here. Typically, gristmills became a kind of gathering spot, because a lot of people had to use them regularly.” The mill itself was employed until the late 1910s, after which time it lay dormant until the 1930s, when an attempt was made to restore it to its original condition (1852-68). In 1950, local residents formed the DuPage Graue Mill Corporation, which was responsible for fixing the waterwheel and founding the museum. Today, remnants of the pioneer days of old Fullersburg are encapsulated at the Graue Mill Museum.
The Great Debate
While Graue was fortifying his mill, the United States was embroiled in a controversy over the issue of slavery that had been raging since its incipient stages as a nation. The tradition of West African slavery on American soil predates the Declaration of Independence, when the modern-day Eastern Seaboard was comprised of 13 British colonies. Slavery holds an ignominious position in the U.S. Constitution, whose crafters came to an agreement that a slave would tally three-fifths of a person—that is, in determining representation in the House of Representatives. But by the early 19th Century, slavery had become a decidedly sectional issue between northern and southern states, as manufacturing and mining evolved the northern economy, while that of the South remained predominantly agricultural. About 1830, the anti-slavery movement in the North received a boost from Abolitionist publications such as William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, that demanded the cessation of this long-standing institution in the United States. It stated: The conditions of slaves varied
from master to master, but it is beyond dispute that many were treated with abominable cruelty and contemptuousness. Photos by Marcello Rodarte 58
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