This historic sawmill played an important role in the settlement, clearing, and development of the surrounding countryside. Its machinery was manufactured in the late 1860s by Halbert and Paige of Painesville, Ohio, and by D. Lane and Company of Montpelier, Vermont, then shipped to LeSueur County by steamboat and first operated on upper Lake Jefferson before being moved in 1870 to its present location, where it remained for more than a century. Frequent financial panics between 1870 and 1900 caused the mill to pass through a number of owners before Leonard Geldner bought it from the McCabe brothers; after working as a millhand for several earlier owners, he became proprietor in 1906. Leo Geldner, from whom LeSueur County purchased the mill in 1978, was the second generation of his family to spend much of his life working there, and from 1978 through 1982 the county restored the mill as a historic site with local funds and grants from the United States Department of the Interior and the Minnesota Historical Society. The mill stood in Minnesota’s Big Woods, a belt of deciduous hardwood timber between the northeastern coniferous forests and the southwestern prairie and Red River Valley, ranging from 20 to 60 miles wide and marked by its abrupt rise from prairie grassland and its clear boundary with the evergreen-dominated northeastern forest. The Big Woods consisted chiefly of hard and soft maple, basswood, oak, elm, ash, hackberry, boxelder, and various nut trees, with pine and red cedar as its principal evergreen species.