The site depicted in Jasper Francis Cropsey's The Old Mill is the Sanford gristmill, which stood on the banks of the Wawayanda Creek near Warwick, New York, not far from the spot where Cropsey had built his palatial estate, "Aladdin," in 1869. Rural water mills had long been at the heart of America's pre­industrial economy, but by the 1870s, they were fast being replaced by more efficient steam-powered mills and factories. As a beloved and endangered symbol of a simpler past, the water mill had considerable sentimental appeal in Cropsey's day. Cropsey was a prominent member of the second generation of New York's Hudson River School. He built his reputation as a painter of fall landscapes, producing scores of paintings that captured the sunlit atmosphere of autumn in New York and New England. These qualities are fully revealed in The Old Mill, which ranks among the most important of his works from the 1870s. Cropsey exhibited it at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where he was awarded a medal for "excellence" in oils.

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