Grafton (town), Wisconsin  Grafton is a town in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, United States, and is in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. The town was created in 1846 and at the time of the 2010 census had a population of 4,053. Grafton is located on the western shore of Lake Michigan. German and Irish immigrants first settled in Grafton in the 1840s. Their centers of settlement became the unincorporated communities of Lakefield and Ulao, as well as the Village of Grafton, which is partially located in the town. 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 the year 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. The Wisconsin territorial legislature officially created the Town of Grafton in 1846. James T. Gifford, an investor who founded Elgin, Illinois, developed the community of Ulao in 1847 as a port on Lake Michigan. At the time, steamships were common on the Great Lakes and burned massive amounts of wood for fuel. A steamship could consume wood equivalent to several acres worth of forest on single journey. Much of Grafton was primeval beech-maple forest, which settlers were clearing for agriculture, and Gifford saw an opportunity for Ulao to prosper as a steamship refueling station. He built a sawmill, a warehouse, and a one-thousand-foot-long pier on the lake where ships docked to buy wood. The community prospered in the 1850s and 1860s, but by the end of the American Civil War, Ozaukee County's forests had been largely depleted, and Ulao declined, with most of the land being converted to agriculture. The Village of Grafton was incorporated from some of the town's land in 1896. 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 hosted a speech by Nazi-supporter Fritz Julius Kuhn in 1939. The camp closed with the outbreak of World War Two in 1941. George Froboese, a prominent member of the camp, committed suicide in 1942 while being escorted to New York to answer a Federal subpoena.