 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.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.