Brummel Farm: Site 1
Brummel Farm on Butterfield Road
Heinrich Brummel was born in 1795 in Verl, Prussia. He married Gertrude Ahnhorst in 1823. He and Gertrude had one child, Johann, before she died in 1826. He later married Anna Maria Stickling and they had nine children. One of their sons, Joseph, was born in 1837. Joseph and his brother William immigrated to the United States in 1851. They departed from the port of Bremen and arrived in New York on the ship Orion.
Joseph migrated to Montgomery, Illinois after his arrival in the U.S., and began farming. He married Katharina Hermreck in 1864. In 1870, Joseph, Katharina and their children, Henry, William, and Mary, moved to Naperville where Joseph worked as a farm tenant. The family moved again in 1871, this time to Winfield Township in DuPage County. Joseph had bought 94 acres of land east of the current intersection of Butterfield and Eola Roads. The farmhouse had been constructed prior to 1871. It had a dirt floor basement, a foundation of flat stones, and a rough-hewn timber framework. Joseph and Katharina had eleven children together before Joseph passed away in 1895. Almost ten years later Katharina died from asthma. In 2000 Charles Brummel, the great-grandson of Joseph and Katharina Brummel, discovered a blooming peony plant in the woods around this site, which is with all probability the original peony plant their family brought with them from Prussia in the 1850s.
One of Joseph and Katharina’s sons, William, born in 1868, married Emma Feldott of site 52 in 1893. In 1908, William and Emma bought their first farm on Main Street Road in Batavia, just west of the current Fermilab site. Eleven years later, in 1919, the Brummels purchased the farmland at the intersection of the E.J. & E. Railway at Butterfield Road (site 1). William and Emma had seven children together, one dying in infancy. Of those seven children, Andrew Henry, born in 1897, married Helen Kammes of site 50 in 1920. They farmed William’s land and raised twelve children. In 1943, Andrew bought the Ed Reiser farm along Warrenville-Batavia Road. They built a house and lived there for seven years until Hammerschmidt Gravel Co. bought it in 1950. William died that year and Andrew purchased the family homestead at site 1. The Brummels owned around 115 acres of land. They farmed the land at site 1 until 1967 when they leased it to Andrew’s cousin, Joseph Brummel, who also farmed at site 57 on Eola Rd. Joseph stayed and farmed Andrew’s land until the state of Illinois purchased it in 1969. Andrew and Helen retired to Geneva in 1970.