Peotone Mill: The Prairie Windmill

The sixty-foot windmill tower rising over Peotone, Illinois is the last of its kind in the state. Built in eighteen seventy-two by Frederick Rathje and Christoph Elling, it was designed by Dutch millwrights but built in the style of a German smock mill, making it one of the only examples of that design type ever constructed in Illinois. Rathje married Wilhelmina Luhmann, an immigrant from Hanover, Germany, and the mill sat at the center of a German-American farming community.

For several years it ground wheat, buckwheat, rye, corn, and feed for local farmers and travelers crossing the prairie. The mill eventually passed down in the Rathje family to Paul Rathje, who donated it along with the surrounding land to the Village of Peotone in nineteen eighty-two. The same year it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

It still stands today as a landmark, the lone survivor of a once-common prairie technology.