When Father Boniface Wimmer and 18 followers arrived from Germany in 1846, Saint Vincent was a small frontier parish with 300 acres of natural resources. The Benedictines used those resources, along with their ingenuity, vision, and talents, to build a self-sufficient foundation for a life of prayer and ministry to the community. In nearby fields they grew wheat, corn, barley, rye, oats, and buckwheat, and to turn those harvests into flour for bread and food for their animals the monks built the gristmill here, one of the first buildings they constructed. It has operated consistently since 1854. At its peak in 1913, the mill ground enough flour to make more than 150,000 pounds of Saint Vincent Bread, which fed students and monks and was also sold in the secular community. In recent years, the mill has continued to provide flour for Saint Vincent Bread at almost every meal, to make Holy Eucharist hosts for local churches, and to offer a limited amount of stone-ground flour for sale. In the 1990s, insurance problems with the wooden mill seemed to leave no option but demolition, but a creative plan by the Benedictines, supported by area foundations, saved the last remaining vestige of Father Wimmer's original physical plant and preserved an uninterrupted milling tradition. Today the gristmill houses a museum and general store and remains a vital part of the Saint Vincent community. Nearby coal deposits were mined by independent for-profit companies, and the coal heated homes, fueled industry, and powered the gristmill by steam until it was converted to electricity in 1952. Mining also damaged the mill and community: subsidence caused the mill to crack and settle and seriously flooded the basement. In the late 1960s, after the easily accessible coal was removed, the mines were abandoned, then filled with water that carried minerals such as pyrite into the nearby stream, polluting it and turning it orange. The Benedictines of Saint Vincent and other members of the Loyalhanna Mine Drainage Coalition later found a way to remove this pollution and restore the stream through passive wetlands behind the gristmill. Using natural processes with no pumps, motors, electricity, or chemicals, the wetlands remove as much as 90 percent of the polluting iron oxide formed when pyrite reacts with oxygen, making the stream fit for wildlife and human enjoyment.