The Great Windmill War
(Page 2 of 4)
April 2004
Ronald S. Barlow
European inspired, American made
RELATED CONTENT
Erecting a Sectional Wheel Windmill...
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Windmill Trade Literature... and then some...
Windmills make a Y2K comeback...
Catch, Restore and Release...
Distinctly American wind engines evolved from the enormous Dutch-style wooden grist mills — complete with cloth sails and living quarters for the miller and his wife — that New Amsterdam colonists built up and down "Broadway" on Manhattan Island beginning in 1624.
Windmill design didn't evolve much during the next 100 years. They still looked like inverted three-story ice cream cones with doors and windows. The rapid migration of farmers and ranchers westward, however, necessitated lighter, portable windmills that could be left alone to turn unattended in the slightest breeze and also be strong enough to weather frequent storms.
Some enterprising pioneers built their own ground-level, paddle-wheel-style wooden windmills, mounted vertically in open-sided boxes facing the prevailing wind. Other homesteaders improvised using simple canvas sailed windmills mounted on 20-foot wooden towers. The pivot-mounted fan's direction was controlled by a diagonal wooden beam, which stretched from the top of the tower to a movable stake driven in the ground below.
From Nebraska to the Oklahoma Territory, some creative but cash-poor farmers built "battle-axe" style windmills using the slats from packing crates nailed to simple X-shaped arms and placed atop three-story towers of braced sapling poles. One of these crude propellers — 10 feet in diameter — could pump enough water to support 75 head of cattle or irrigate 10 acres of summer vegetables. In wintertime, a 20-mile-an-hour wind could produce enough power to run a sawmill for firewood.
In 1855, an unnamed Iowa farmer hoisted a 17-foot-diameter wooden-bladed turbine to the top of a heroic 70-foot tower and began pumping several hundred gallons of water a day. Other Midwest farmers copied and improved upon his many-bladed style, and a thousand windmill patents were formally recorded during the next two decades.
Modern 'windcatchers'
One of the best sellers of the 1880s was a wooden-bladed windmill invented by a young Connecticut mechanic named Daniel Halladay. The earlier Dutch smock-style windmills had no speed governors, other than a primitive friction clutch and the reduction of the amount of exposed canvas on their wood-framed blades. This shortcoming led to frequent damage — or outright destruction because the fragile wooden fan whirled too fast in a storm.