Bloomingdale's Holstein Mill

Bloomingdale's Holstein Mill. . Less than a half-mile from this windmill is where Henry Holstein and his wife Louisa settled in Bloomingdale from Germany in the 1850s. Purchasing farmland near the southwest corner of Bloomingdale Road and Schick Road, they built a windmill for grinding grain on their farm across from the existing Village Hall complex. , , The mill was put together with wooden pegs; the gears were made of hard wood. The millstones, imported from France, were kept sharp by Henry Raap, another German immigrant. The mill could produce 400 bushels a day and was kept very busy by local farmers coming to have their wheat ground into flour and their corn into cornmeal. , , In 1899, a tornado came through Bloomingdale and ripped off the top of the mill, containing the wooden logs and wooden pegs. Holstein rebuilt the house and barns on the same foundations but capped the mill building and used it for grain storage only. He chose to rebuild in the Roselle section of Bloomingdale. In 1905, the Bloomingdale property was sold to the Steinbeck family, who farmed it for the next 50 years. , , The millstone survived many years, partly imbedded in the ground on the original site. In an effort to save it by moving it, the very heavy stone was broken into pieces. The pieces are currently arranged in a circle in the north yard of the Bloomingdale Park District Museum, 108 S. Bloomingdale Road.