How Windmills Won the West

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And now it’s time for a look back to a device that helped win the West. He used Jesse with the story of the windmill.

You can drive just about anywhere in America and find windmills if you’re looking for the old metal ones you see in paintings of Texas to the Midwest, from the novelty lawn ornament variety for under one hundred bucks to the towering vintage water pumps, accenting skylines next to barns or pastures and cornfields. Fully restored or in beautiful decay, working or not, these giant relics of Americana aren’t just for decoration, and the West couldn’t have been won without them. Out of the mid-eighteen fifties, Salesman John Burnham and Machinist Daniel Halliday came up with the basic design that we would recognize today with the Holiday Windmill Company. It was relatively lightweight, nimble. It could swivel so it was always facing the wind, an angle its blades to just for speed to avoid damage and strong winds. Automatically, families and farms were able to pump water and store it in tanks anytime the wind was blowing.

Right around the turn of the century. Between the eighteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds, there was over six hundred windmill companies in the United States.

Tanya Meadow is with the American Windmill Museum in Lubbock, Texas.

The American Windmill Museum was started in nineteen ninety-three by a lady who was a teacher at Texas Tech University and Mr. Kroy Harris, who is still our executive director. This building houses over one hundred and ten windmills. We’ve got windmills in here from as big as six-foot wide, which is the diameter of the wheel. How we measure a windmill: up to twenty-five feet wide in diameter. The old steam engines could only go fifteen to thirty miles before they had to stop for water, depending on the terrain. You look at our little towns out here in West Texas, fifteen to thirty miles down the road, there’s a little town probably sprung up there because that’s where the railroad had to stop in order for them to be able to get water for the steam engine. So, there was a major relationship between the railroads and the windmills.

The windmill pumped the water to power the steam engines on the trains of the first transcontinental railroad out West. There’s only one company that stood the test of time and continues to build them right here in the good old U.S.A.

And that would be the Air Motor Company. The Air Motor Company started off in Chicago, Illinois, laid eighteen hundreds, and then in the nineteen fifties they were purchased by a Texan and the plant was moved to San Angelo, Texas, where it still is today. And they still make windmills today. Your larger ranches still use windmills. It’s so much easier to put up a windmill for under twenty thousand dollars than it is to try to run twenty miles of electrical line in order to be able to pump water for your large ranches. And the Four Sixes Ranches, a big one, they actually have a full-time windmiller. One of the reasons that the Air Motor business is still in business today is they were always thinking: What can we do to make life easier? What can we do to make life better? They were one of the first ones to create what was called the power mill, and the power mill would have been a different gearing system on a building outside the barn or one of your other outbuildings, and inside underneath there would be a grinder so that they could grind their corn and their wheats in order to be able to have their flowers in order to do their breads and grains. They also were one of the first ones to enclose the gearbox. It has an oil reservoir underneath it and a big bonnet on top of it. And they said that you only had to oil your windmill once a year. Now, that’s a major time-saving as opposed to having climb up there three or four times a day and put oil on the gears.

Many of the windmills that dotted the path out West were rendered obsolete by the nineteen thirties as electric and diesel-powered trains took over the railways. Once electric pumps became popular, windmills on farms went neglected and began to break down over time without proper maintenance. But some people like to get these old wind pumps working again, like Rick Ritter, Saint Jacob, Illinois. He restored his flint and whaling brand windmill that’s been standing on the family farm as long as he can remember.

I just thought it was so cool. I never got to see it run till I was forty-something when I fixed it. It always stood out here on the farm and never got used. It had weeds, vines, morning glories climbed all the way up to the top.

Probably nineteen ninety. I started cutting vines at the bottom, and eventually, after all, everything died on it. I was able to pull it all off, all the vines that were grown around it. I had an old guy tell me, said, “You need to get those vines off there, because what will happen during a heavy windstorm with vines and stuff on there blocking it. The wind will take the whole thing to the ground.”

So he said, basically, “Even need to get the vines off of it, or else you’re going to be out there with a cutting torch cutting it up.” And I just… a whole… I just didn’t want to lose it.

I thought it was just a neat piece of history to have standing here. So I cut the vines, pulled it off. Took me years to get that done until we got it all taken down, which I had a cherry picker come in and take it down, and it stayed on the ground for a year while everything got repainted and refinished on it. I think they bought it used. Nineteen twenty-six is the year on this one. It’s been standing here since I was a kid. I never got to see it run at all till I was still.

Actually, I restored it. I must have shot a pickup truck-load of twenty-two caliber bullets out here and whatever. And for some good reason, I just never shot holes in the windmill. Most windmills you see, if they aren’t destroyed from wind damage or whatever, somebody’s blowed holes in them, and especially in that crown that’s on top of here. And once you blow holes in that from the bottom up, especially, water gets in the top, gets into the gears and bearings, rusts, it’s solid, and it’s pretty well junked. That’s the way a lot of these got ruined was bullet holes. Basically. The other way is you would run them completely out of oil and let them spin, because what will happen: You’ll get a big windstorm come up, it’ll spin all the bearings in narrowill get really hot, and all of a sudden it will lock up in the inertia of that spinning windmill, will wide this thing up like a ball. Put it on the ground once again. A torch comes out, and you’re gonna end up hauling it away a scrap iron. So I always liked it standing here and just didn’t shoot at it. And when the weeds grew up, I pulled the weeds off of it, and then eventually I fix it.

And great job as always to Jesse. And, my goodness! There’s an American Windmill Museum in Lubbock, Texas. And a special thanks if you’re ever driving through, stop eye. The windmill story, an important part of American history. Here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.