The Fabyan Windmill: How an Authentic Dutch-Style Mill Ended Up on the Fox River in Illinois
On the east bank of the Fox River in Geneva, Illinois, some forty miles west of Chicago, a five-story wooden windmill spreads its sails above the treetops of a county forest preserve. The Fabyan Windmill is no decorative garden ornament. It is a genuine smock mill of the Dutch type, built by a German immigrant craftsman in the 1850s, hauled across the prairie by an eccentric millionaire in 1914, and painstakingly returned to working order by Dutch millwrights in the early 2000s. On grinding days its millstones still turn, which makes it one of the very few authentic, fully functional windmills of its kind anywhere in the United States.
A German craftsman on the Illinois prairie
The mill began its life a considerable distance from the river it now overlooks. Between 1850 and 1860, a German immigrant craftsman named Louis Blackhaus built it in the farming settlement of York Center, near present-day Lombard in DuPage County. The mid-nineteenth century brought waves of German settlers to northern Illinois, and with them came the trades and technologies of the old country, milling prominent among them. What Blackhaus raised on the prairie was remarkable for the American Midwest: a full European-style smock mill with a tapering wooden tower and a rotating cap, at a time when most American gristmills ran on water power and most American wind machines were simple pumps for drawing well water. For decades the mill served the surrounding farm community, grinding grain into flour and animal feed. By the early twentieth century, however, steam engines and industrial roller mills had made wind-driven grinding uneconomical, and the old mill's working life seemed to be drawing to a close.
Colonel Fabyan and the Riverbank estate
At that point George Fabyan entered the story, a Chicago textile magnate with deep pockets, restless curiosity and a taste for the extraordinary. From the first years of the twentieth century, Fabyan and his wife Nelle developed Riverbank, a sprawling country estate along the Fox River just south of Geneva. The property grew into one of the strangest private domains in the Midwest. The farmhouse at its heart was remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright into what is now known as the Fabyan Villa. Around it spread a Japanese garden, a Roman-style swimming pool, greenhouses, a lighthouse and enclosures that at various times held bears and other exotic animals. Fabyan also bankrolled Riverbank Laboratories, a private research operation whose staff worked on acoustics and, most famously, cryptology. The codebreakers trained at Riverbank, among them William Friedman and Elizebeth Smith Friedman, went on to shape American cryptanalysis during the First World War and long afterward. Into this collector's landscape, a full-size working windmill fit perfectly.
Moving a windmill across the prairie
In 1914 Fabyan purchased the old Blackhaus mill and had it dismantled piece by piece, its heavy timbers, gears and millstones carted roughly twenty miles west to Riverbank. Taking apart and rebuilding a smock mill is an enormous undertaking even today; in the horse-and-wagon era it bordered on the heroic. The reconstruction, on a rise above the east bank of the Fox River, occupied skilled workers for a long stretch, and the mill that rose again in Geneva was carefully fitted back together rather than merely copied. Nor did Fabyan treat his acquisition as a static ornament. The mill was put back to work grinding grain for the estate, and it quickly became the visual signature of Riverbank, its sails visible to travelers along the river road. Where countless historic mills were left to rot in place during those decades, this one survived precisely because a wealthy enthusiast wanted it badly enough to move it.
What exactly is a smock mill?
The Fabyan Windmill belongs to a distinct family of European mill design. A smock mill has a fixed, many-sided wooden tower that tapers as it rises, said to resemble the loose linen smock once worn by farm laborers. Only the cap at the very top rotates, carrying the windshaft and the sail cross, so the sails can be turned to face the wind from any direction. This arrangement distinguishes it from the older post mill, in which the entire body of the mill pivots on a massive central post, and from the tower mill, which achieves the same result with a masonry tower. Inside, the technology is a masterpiece of pre-industrial engineering executed almost entirely in wood. The turning sails drive a windshaft, whose great brake wheel meshes with a smaller gear called the wallower; a vertical shaft then carries the power down through the tower to the spur wheel, which drives the millstones that do the actual grinding. Every gear tooth, bearing surface and shaft in such a mill demands precise joinery, which is exactly why the craft of the millwright became a specialized profession in its own right.
From private folly to public landmark
George Fabyan died in 1936 and Nelle Fabyan in 1939, and the great estate did not long survive them as a private domain. The Forest Preserve District of Kane County acquired the core of Riverbank, and the grounds became the Fabyan Forest Preserve, open to everyone. The windmill passed into public ownership along with the villa, the Japanese garden and the riverside lawns, and it soon became the emblem of the preserve and one of the best-loved landmarks in the Fox Valley. Public affection, however, could not stop the Illinois weather. Freezing winters, humid summers and driving storms are hard on any wooden structure, and a windmill, with its exposed sails and enormous moving parts, suffers more than most. Despite periodic repairs across the twentieth century, the mill gradually declined, and by the 1990s it had deteriorated to the point where cosmetic patching was no longer enough.
The Dutch come to Illinois
What followed is one of the finest mill restorations ever carried out in North America. The Forest Preserve District committed to a full, historically faithful rebuilding and brought in professional millwrights from the Netherlands, where the craft of building and repairing wind-powered mills has survived unbroken. Working with traditional techniques and materials, the restoration team renewed the cap, the sails and the internal machinery, treating the mill not as a static monument but as a machine that had to run again. The project was completed in 2005, and since then the Fabyan Windmill has been able to do what it was built to do in the 1850s: catch the wind and grind grain. The mill is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and trained volunteers now operate it on selected days, demonstrating the whole chain from turning sail to milled flour for visitors who may never have seen a working windmill before.
Visiting the mill today
The Fabyan Forest Preserve straddles both banks of the Fox River between Geneva and Batavia, and the windmill stands on the east side, an easy stop along the Fox River Trail, one of the most popular cycling and walking routes in the Chicago region. Seasonal open days allow visitors to climb into the mill with volunteer guides and watch the wooden gearing at work, and the surrounding preserve rewards a longer visit: the Frank Lloyd Wright-remodeled Fabyan Villa operates as a museum, and the restored Japanese garden nearby is among the oldest of its kind in the Midwest. Photographers tend to come at golden hour, when low light catches the lattice of the sails. Few places in America let you experience an authentic European windmill in full working order, and fewer still wrap it in a story involving cryptographers, exotic animals and a millionaire who moved a five-story building because he liked it.
Explore on the map
The Fabyan Windmill is a reminder that remarkable mills are not confined to the Netherlands or the old milling regions of Europe; they turn up on riverbanks in the American Midwest too. You can find its exact location, along with hundreds of other historic windmills and mills around the world, on our interactive map. Zoom in on Illinois and the Fox Valley, or set off from Geneva on a virtual journey through milling history, one sail at a time.