485 Madeline Drive

Four-story mill building of 1910, standing in the eastern center of a sloping lot on Madeline Drive. The National Register nomination for the Upper Busch Gardens Cultural Landscape Historic District records an irregular plan of roughly 546 square feet, stone walls on the first three levels and stucco on the fourth, wood half-timbering laid over both, a steeply pitched gable roof, and wood windows, rectangular and arched, some of them glazed in diamond-pane leaded glass. A water wheel is fixed to the north facade, where a waterfall once fell. The same document calls this the most significant property in the district and the only building remaining from Busch Gardens.

Adolphus and Lilly Busch bought the Ivy Wall estate on South Orange Grove Boulevard in 1904 and began acquiring the land behind it. What grew there, about thirty acres across an upper and a lower garden, was laid out by Robert Gordon Fraser, a Scottish nurseryman and landscape designer who lived in a cottage on the property and kept more than fifty gardeners at work. The gardens opened to the public in 1906. The Pacific Electric added a Busch Gardens stop to handle the traffic. In 1915 a million and a half people came through in a single year.

The mill went up in 1910 and became the most famous feature of the gardens, photographed from every angle. Postcards posted in 1913 caption it Old Mill, Banbury Cross. There is no historic mill at Banbury. The reference is the nursery rhyme the Busch grandchildren knew, and the detailing is Bavarian. The wheel turned and the stream ran under a bridge into a pond, but nothing was ever ground here: it was a folly, a place for Busch and his friends to sit with cigars and for the grandchildren to play. Lilly filled the slopes around it with tableaux, Snow White and her seven dwarves, Red Riding Hood in a gingerbread house, Cinderella at her hearth.

Two bedrooms and two baths in 912 square feet, with a lofted guest space under exposed rafters and a two-story cellar below, the mill's lower works. Handcrafted millwork and built-in cabinetry survive throughout, along with the leaded stained glass. The kitchen is green tile under a copper hood. Outside there is a brick patio, a detached two-car garage, a storage shed, and more than 16,000 square feet of the old garden, still carrying the concrete paths, rock steps, rock planters and the pond that the nomination lists as contributing structures. A two-story addition was built onto the southeast corner in 1946 and enlarged in 1955 to make the mill a house.

The gardens closed to the public in 1928, reopened in fits between 1933 and 1938, and were subdivided from 1937. Ivy Wall came down in 1952. Before the end the grounds took the archery tournament in The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Twelve Oaks barbecue in Gone with the Wind. The mill outlasted the mansion, the gardeners and the crowds, and it is still on its own hill with the water wheel on the wall.

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