In the 1850s, Henry Holstein and his wife Louisa settled in Bloomingdale from Germany and bought farmland near the southwest corner of Bloomingdale Road and Schick Road, where they built a windmill for grinding grain on their farm across from the existing Village Hall complex. The mill was assembled with wooden pegs, its gears were made of hard wood, and its millstones were imported from France and kept sharp by Henry Raap, another German immigrant. Able to produce 400 bushels a day, the mill was heavily used by local farmers who brought wheat to be ground into flour and corn to be made into cornmeal. In 1899, a tornado tore off the top of the mill, including its wooden logs and pegs. Holstein rebuilt the house and barns on the same foundations, capped the mill building, and used it only for grain storage, while choosing 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 for many years partly embedded in the ground on the original site, but when an effort was made to save it by moving it, the heavy stone broke into pieces, which are now arranged in a circle in the north yard of the Bloomingdale Park District Museum, 108 S. Bloomingdale Road.