Lindsborg Old Mill & Swedish Heritage Museum

Swedes from Värmland, led by Pastor Olof Olsson, settled Lindsborg in the spring of 1869, and in 1872 Charlie "Qvarn" Johnson built the town's first water-powered grist mill on the Smoky Hill. The building standing now is the third mill on the site. Theodore Teichgraeber, master of the mill since 1889, rebuilt it as the Smoky Valley Roller Mills six months after an 1897 fire. A roller mill crushes grain between corrugated steel cylinders instead of millstones, which handled the hard winter wheat the country had turned to. The river drove turbines on vertical axles, not a wheel; steam was added when the flow failed, and electricity in the 1930s. Four to six people ran it, at times around the clock, through 30 to 35 bushels an hour. It closed for good in 1955, went to McPherson County in 1962, and was restored by 1981. On the first Saturday in May, at Millfest, the machinery runs again, without grain.

Beside it stands the Swedish Pavilion from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, a manor house designed by Ferdinand Boberg, built in sections north of Stockholm and shipped through Baltimore. W. W. Thomas, the American minister to Sweden and Norway, bought it after the fair and gave it to Bethany College in memory of Carl Aaron Swensson, the college president who had died that February. For more than sixty years it housed Birger Sandzén's art department. It moved here in 1969, and King Carl XVI Gustaf rededicated it in 1976.