BETWEEN THE BOOKENDS

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Did John Deere produce a windmill?

What Illinois city was known as the windmill capital of the world?

Who was David Bradley, anyway?

Most everyone who reads Farm Collector has heard of an Aermotor windmill. May be you have heard of a Dempster and a Fairbury. But how about Challenge, Gem, I.X.L. or Diamond? Those windmills and more than 200 others (I stopped counting) are mentioned in T. Lindsay Baker's North American Windmill Manufacturers Trade Literature: A Descriptive Guide.

This 600-page book lists and describes, alphabetically, every American windmill manufacturer or distributor that generated printed advertising in the last 150 years. Foreign manufacturers who marketed wind mills in the U.S. also are listed. Baker even includes the prominent dealers and distributors in the windmill industry.

To compile this guide, Baker drew on his vast personal collection of windmill trade literature. He also visited museums, university holdings and private collections to view and record information contained in trade literature. From that extensive research, we learn that a great deal of information is found in the surviving magazine ads, flyers and parts lists. As collectors of vintage machinery, we have always been thankful for packrats. Now we realize their historical importance.

This guide details the early windmill companies, and the people who owned them. Many windmill companies changed ownership and relocated several times before finally fading away to obscurity. The Aermotor Company, for instance, has operated in Chicago, Broken Arrow, Okla.; Conway, Ark.; Buenos Aries, Argentina; and San Angelo, Texas. We learn of the companies that pioneered the water pumping windmill in the 1800s, to the swarm of new companies that attempted to cash in on the energy crisis of the 1970s.

For each company featured in the book, Baker includes bibliographic information and extensive documentation of all known advertisements and promotional material distributed by the company.

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