Rural Windmills

Look at any photograph of farms and ranches in the 1800s, and you’ll likely see a working windmill in the landscape. The windmill was one of the inventions that made settlement of the Great Plains possible. (Others included sod houses, barbed wire, and perhaps even the Colt revolver.) Windmills were vital to American settlers who traveled from the lush, fertile East to homestead a patch of land in the much drier West, breathing life into an otherwise barren landscape. The image of the windmill – spoked sails spinning atop a tall, wooden tower and one of the