Original Site of First Oil Mill in Texas

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just along for the ride. Now, Frederick Hillje had a problem and a plan, and in 1866 he set about solving one with the other. What he erected that year, right here in Fayette County, was the first oil mill in Texas.

And the way he built it, well, that's where the story gets interesting. He didn't wait around for the right equipment to show up. He took a German-made sugar beet crusher and adapted it, right here, locally, to process seed.

You heard that right. A sugar beet crusher, doing work nobody ever designed it to do, and doing it well enough to earn a place in the history of this state. That's a certain kind of Texas ingenuity, even if the machine itself came from somewhere else.

In time, Hillje enlarged the operation. The adapted crusher gave way to a proper, enlarged plant with regular milling machinery, this time built for cottonseed. Things were looking up.

Then the railroad made its decision. The Galveston, Houston and San Antonio Railroad came through the region, and it bypassed High Hill. When a railroad passes you by in that era, you feel it.

Hillje felt it. So in 1880, he picked up and moved the mill to Weimar. The mill followed the iron rails, as so many Texas enterprises did.

But what started in 1866, with one man and one repurposed machine, had already written its name into the record. First oil mill in Texas, built from borrowed ingenuity and a crusher that had no idea what it was getting into.

What the marker says

Erected by Frederick Hillje, 1866, using German-made sugar beet crusher adapted locally to seed processing. Later enlarged plant had regular milling machinery for cottonseed. After Galveston, Houston & San Antonio Railroad bypassed High Hill, Hillje moved mill to Weimar, 1880. (1967)