Grafton is located at 43°19′4″N 87°57′14″W / 43.31778°N 87.95389°W / 43.31778; -87.95389 (43.317904, −87.954113). According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 5.10 square miles (13.21 km2), of which 5.06 square miles (13.11 km) is land and 0.04 square miles (0.10 km2) is water. The village is bordered by the City of Cedarburg and the Town of Cedarburg to the west and by the Town of Grafton to the north, east, and south.
The village is located in the Southeastern Wisconsin glacial till plains that were created by the Wisconsin glaciation during the most recent ice age. The soil in area is a mixture of well-draining material, loess, and loam, which all overlie a layer of glacial till. The village contains 40-foot high Silurian dolomite outcrops in Lime Kiln Park, which were used for quarrying in the 19th century and have since been used for geological studies.
The Milwaukee River flows south through downtown Grafton. Early industry utilized the river by constructing three dams for mechanical hydropower: one at the Grafton Flour Mill and Badger Worsted Mill, another at the Wisconsin Chair Company factory, and a third near the Milwaukee Falls Lime Company's lime kilns in present-day Lime Kiln Park. The chair factory and lime kiln dams have since been removed.
Before white settlers arrived in the area, the Grafton area was an upland forest dominated by American beech and sugar maple trees. There were also white cedars growing along the river. Much of the original forest was cleared to prepare the land for agriculture. The Bratt Woods, a nature preserve maintained by the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust on the eastern bank of the Milwaukee River, has old growth endemic trees and retains the character of the pre-settlement beech-maple forests.
As land development continues to reduce wild areas, wildlife is forced into closer proximity with human communities like Grafton. Large mammals, including white-tailed deer, coyotes, and red foxes can be seen within the village limits. Many birds, including great blue herons and wild turkeys are found in and around the village. The Bratt Woods nature preserve is a habitat for the American gromwell, a State-designated special concern plant species.
The region struggles with many invasive species, including the emerald ash borer, common carp, reed canary grass, the common reed, purple loosestrife, garlic mustard, Eurasian buckthorns, and honeysuckles.
The first Europeans to visit the area were the Jesuit missionaries Claude-Jean Allouez and Claude Bablon, who visited a Native American village on the Milwaukee River near the future site of Grafton around 1670.
Timothy Wooden, who arrived in 1839 from the eastern United States, is considered Grafton's first permanent white resident. The majority of the early residents were immigrants from Germany and Ireland. In the early 1840s, the village was called Hamburg, because Jacob Eichler, one of the village founders, was an immigrant from Hamburg, Germany. A post office for "Hamburgh" was established in 1844.
The Wisconsin territorial legislature officially created the town of Grafton in 1846. The village of Grafton was officially incorporated from some of the town's land on March 30, 1896.
The village's early settlers utilized the Milwaukee River as a source of power for milling. In 1846, a group farmers built the Grafton Flour Mill. In 1880, the owner of Cedarburg's woolen mill opened a mill in Grafton to make worsted yarn. At its height, Grafton's woolen mill employed 100 people.
Grafton was also the site of the Milwaukee Falls Lime Company, which quarried limestone in the village and operated lime kilns to manufacture slaked lime. The kilns are preserved in Grafton's Lime Kiln Park, on the west bank of the Milwaukee River. Lime production played an important part in the village economy until the 1920s.
In the early 20th century, the Wisconsin Chair Company of Port Washington operated a furniture factory in the village, which manufactured phonographs among other things. The company originally manufactured phonographs exclusively for Edison Records, but in 1917 it started its own Paramount Records subsidiary, which became famous for producing some of the first blues and jazz records, called race records because they were by African-American artists and were marketed to African-American consumers. It is estimated that a quarter of all race records released between 1922 and 1932 were on the Paramount label. Music was originally recorded in Chicago, until the Paramount headquarters and studio moved to the Grafton factory in 1929. Artists including Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown, and Louise Johnson journeyed from the American South to record in Grafton. The studio stopped recording music in 1932, due to the Great Depression, and Paramount Records closed in 1935 and the building was razed in 1938. Today, Grafton is one of the few sites on the Mississippi Blues Trail outside of the American South.
In the late 1930s, a group of pro-Nazi German-Americans affiliated with the German American Bund purchased land on the Milwaukee River in the Town of Grafton. They ran a private camp called Camp Hindenburg and came into the village to march with Nazi flags and meet at the Grafton Hotel. The group hosted a speech by Nazi-supporter Fritz Julius Kuhn in 1939. The camp closed during World War II in 1941.
Grafton experienced significant population growth during the suburbanization that followed World War II. Between 1950 and 1980, the village population increased five-times over, from 1,489 to 8,381. As the population grew, the village annexed more farm land from the town of Grafton for residential subdivisions and commercial developments. The construction of Interstate 43 in the mid-1960s connected Grafton to other communities, such as Milwaukee and Sheboygan.
In 1988 and 1989, the village was the center of a controversy that gained national media attention. In 1987, the Grafton Organization for Library Donations began a campaign to construct a new library facility and announced that the individual or group that gave the largest donation would have right to choose the building's name. Local industrialists Benjamin and Theodore Grob gave $250,000 to the campaign on that condition that the facility be named the USS Liberty Memorial Public Library in honor of thirty-four U.S. citizens killed by Israel during the Six-Day War. Milwaukee-based Jewish organizations protested that the name was antisemitic; although Israel claimed that the attack on the USS Liberty was an accident—a claim confirmed by a U.S. congressional inquiry—some right-wing groups such as the USS Liberty Veterans Association and the Liberty Lobby used the incident as a political lightning rod to promote anti-Zionist and antisemitic positions. However, the Grob brothers claimed that their intentions were patriotic and they wanted to honor victims who had received little official recognition. Media outlets including the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times reported on the story and made public the Grob brothers' ties to right-wing groups, including the Liberty Lobby, and an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal also found that Benjamin Grob had given money to the Ku Klux Klan, including a $500 contribution to David Duke's 1988 presidential campaign. In spite of the controversy and protests in the community, village president James Grant dismissed the allegations and proceeded to dedicate the library in June 1989, marking the twenty-second anniversary of the USS Liberty incident. Sixty survivors of the Liberty attended the dedication ceremony.
In December 2020 a pharmacist at a local hospital was arrested for allegedly tampering with vials of COVID-19 vaccine.
As is the case in many of the cities and villages in Ozaukee County, Grafton's early economy was primarily agricultural and the first major businesses were hydropowered mills on the Milwaukee River. One of the first was the Grafton Flour Mill, which opened in 1846. The village also had sawmills and a chair-and-bedstead factory. In 1880, the owner of Cedarburg's woolen mill opened a mill in Grafton to make worsted yarn. At its height, Grafton's woolen mill employed 100 people and remained in operation until 1980.
In the early 20th century, the Wisconsin Chair Company of Port Washington operated a chair factory in the village. At the time, the company was the largest business in Ozaukee County, employing one-sixth of all workers. Among other the wooden furniture, the company manufactured phonographs for Edison Records. In 1917, the company decided to start its own subsidiary record label: Paramount Records. In the 1920s, Paramount produced records for African-American consumers, and from 1929 to 1935, Paramount recorded and manufactured records in-house at the Grafton chair factory before closing during the Great Depression.
In the 21st century, Grafton's largest employers are in retail, health care, and manufacturing. In the early 2000s, a commercial district with big-box stores developed in eastern Grafton. Many of the village's largest retailers are located in the eastern Grafton commercial district near the intersection of Interstate 43 and Wisconsin Highway 60. Aurora Medical Center Grafton, which opened in 2010, is the largest employer in the village and is also located in the eastern commercial district. Many residents commute for work, reflecting the larger trend of Ozaukee County as a majority-commuter community.
