Windmills Harvest the Breeze

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Over the years, gas engines and pump jacks replaced lots of windmills because they were more reliable and worked with the same pumps the mills powered. With rural electrification, motors replaced many more windmills. However, the American windmill is still an important water management tool where power is inaccessible and groundwater is relatively plentiful.  

Jack Nelson, a 95-year-old Texan, has worked on numerous ranches in Texas and Mexico and remembers working on mills in the early 1930s in West Texas. He and another hand maintained 24 windmills on the 26,000-acre Barlow ranch, going from one to another on horseback, with a pack mule carrying tools. Although the windmills were fairly simple, Nelson recalls that something always needed to be replaced.

Despite the care that windmills require, they possess a sweeter side. Both Jack Nelson and James Monroe, another longtime rancher in South Texas, remember the peaceful feeling that arose from listening to an old mill slowly turn at the end of the day, during the cool of the evening. Nelson described it as the windmills talking to you, as they creak when the wind changes.

Monroe put it this way: “An old windmill will turn and squeak and squawk and groan, and it’s a sound that will absolutely grow all the way into you, into the pit of your soul.”

Ultimately, the American windmill not only helped farms and ranches in the Great Plains and Southwest to succeed, but those in other countries as well. Argentina thrived with the arrival of the steel-blade windmill, and the mills were used as far away as Australia. Now these windmills are largely relics, but Americans owe a debt of gratitude to these simple towers that helped settle a land.

Julie Bastuk, a native of Texas, lives with her husband and two children in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is still a country girl at heart.

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