Norma's Windmill - Harvesting the Wind

Credits: Nebraska Game & Parks Commission,
Article from NEBRASKAland Magazine, August 1984

Harvesting The Wind
by Don Cunningham

"Like a flag marking the spot where a small victory had been won in the fight for water in an arid land," the windmill is still a common plains landmark."

You can always spot the folks who grew up on farms. They are the ones who mist up when they hear the clank and clatter of an old Aeromotor in the night, or who stop along the highway to watch the sun set through the tower of a Sandhills Dempster. To them the windmill is a symbol -- of order, of tranquility, of water on the wide, dusty plains.

To historian Walter Prescott Webb, the windmill ranked with the Colt revolver and barbed wire as one of the Plains homesteaders' three necessities for survival. "The windmill," he says, "was like a flag marking the spot where a small victory had been won in the fight for water in an arid land."

The rain might not come, the creek might go dry, but a good well and a windmill meant abundant cool, sweet water -- for livestock, for the garden, the orchard, the house. The windmill's incessant whirr and clatter, perhaps at times annoying, is also the fondly remembered lullaby for millions of farm kids, and the reassuring sound of safety to the framer, blizzard-blinded between house and barn.

In the heat of summer, the stock tank's cool water worked therapeutic wonders on a neck burned red by July sun, and for the myriad irritations across the backs and around the ankles of the harvest crew. It was a jungle gym for kids (warned solemnly not to climb it), and on the treeless plains, at times, even a makeshift gallows. Most of all it meant water. Even now there is hardly a farmyard windmill tower, functional, rusting and abandoned, or meticulously restored and merely decorative, the does not have, handing from a twist of baling wire, a tin cup -- evidence of the central role this tallest of the prairie flowers played in the settling of the west.

The tall, galvanized steel tower and its glistening fan have a long lineage. Arabian writers of the 10th century reported seeing windmills used to irrigate gardens in Persia; almost certainly sail-equipped machinery for lifting water and turning millstones was in use long before those earliest written accounts.

Even modern schoolchildren recognize the image of the huge "Dutch" mills standing in low-country tulip beds. Those European mills came with the colonists to North America, and a number of restored examples of that type still stand in various parts of the country. But as settlers moved westward, those large, costly, relatively fragile mills, which demanded practically "live-in" attention, were impractical for homesteaders who needed primarily, a dependable power source for the pumping of water.

In Ellington, Connecticut, in the mid-1800s, a young mechanic named Daniel Halliday declared, "I can invent a self-regulating windmill that will be safe from all danger of destruction in violent windstorms, but after I should get it made I don't know of a single man in the world who would want one." The Halliday mill was patented in 1854; Daniel Halliday proved to be a better inventor than he was a prophet: his self-regulating wooden "section wheel" was a success. For the canvas sails common to the Dutch mills, he substituted thin wooden vanes. In gentle winds the fan was a flat disk, but when the winds grew threateningly strong, its hinged panels fell inward, allowing the wind to blow through freely.

The real market was not in New England though; it was in the west. When the Union Pacific bought 70 giant Halliday mills to provide water for the transcontinental railroad, and other railroads saw their value, the boom was on. The Halliday success -- and a growing market -- spawned imitations, refinements, and new inventions. By 1879, the windmill industry was producing a million dollars' work of mills a year."

Among the new entrepreneurs was C.B. Dempster, who opened his farm equipment, pump, and windmill store in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1878. That little venture developed into a business that, through no more well known for its pumps, is one of only two surviving windmill manufacturers in the United States.

But factory-made mills were not the only option for a plains homesteader. A good many -- perhaps most -- Nebraska settlers could not come up with the $80 or so that the factory mill cost. Or perhaps it just didn't seem reasonable to spend that much on something you could make.

Erwin H. Barbour, Nebraska's state geologist, in Bulletin of the U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station of Nebraska, XI (1899), reports the amazing proliferation of homemade mills in the state. They watered livestock, gardens, orchards, and boarding houses.

The powered feed grinders and corn-shellers, wood saws and churns, and even the line shafts of blacksmith and machine ships. Barbour was impressed: "This much is certain, that they are put up by our best citizens, and not by the worst; and by a stable, and not by a roving, unsettled, of shiftless class. Some builders, by a display of superior management, erect excellent, sometimes without cost, at other times at a merely nominal expense of one or two dollars for extra lumber and hardware. We have seen mills doing good service on market gardens which cost but one dollar and a half; we have seen them on large farms where each mill was pumping water for the cattle on each quarter section, and yet such mills did not cost more than a dollar and seventy-five cents. This is getting good service at a very small cost. From this up there is every gradation in price to mills costing one hundred and fifty dollars, with an efficiency of eight horse power, and capable of grinding food for the stock at the rate of two hundred to three hundred bushels of grain per day."

Today, the homemade mill is gone, and the big wooden fans of the early commercial mills generally turn only as curiosities in parks or the farmyards of windmill enthusiasts who have carefully restored them.

Indeed, it has become fashionable for nostalgic writer to mourn the imminent passing of the windmill itself from the American rural scene. And it is true that in field after field a passerby is likely to see the rusting tower and ragged, bent blades of an old mill, long since abandoned in favor of a submersible pump and REA power.

But these obituaries for the windmill are premature. Especially for cattlemen, the windmill is as useful as it ever was. Few powerlines cross the Sandhills, for example, but the wind is everywhere; for the price of a yearly greasing and a little maintenance, mills still pull cool, sweet water for the stock tanks, and they are unlikely to be replaced soon.

Moreover, harnessing the wind has gone high tech, and the wind may will prove to be as helpful to Nebraskans in the 1990s as it was in the 1890s. Volta Torrey, former editor of Popular Science magazine and author of several works on wind energy, says that "every square foot of refreshing 13-mile-per-hour breeze has the equivalent of about 10 watts of electricity," and "dozens of companies are now manufacturing windmills that generate less than 100 kilowatts for farmers and other individuals who want to produce their own electricity."

Many varieties of wind turbines are being tested, and designs have progressed far beyond the simple Winchargers that charged batteries to power radios on still-dark farms in the days following World War I. Experts generally agree that much research remains to be done before Americans begin harvesting the wind for practical, large-scale power generation, but it may not be so many years before another E.H. Barbour will travel the state and declare again that, "The Platte Valley from Omaha to Denver seems to be the very backbone of the homemade mill."

In the meantime, do not mourn the passing of the windmill. All across the state stands ample proof of the accuracy of a lest part of this bit of doggerel scrawled on the outhouse behind the school district 161 of Cherry County:

We like the Sandhills,
We like it very good,
For the wind it pumps our water,
And the cows they chop our wood.