The whirligigs soar 50 feet into the Carolina blue sky, fantastical kinetic sculptures that spin and rattle in the wind, cobbled-together contraptions of bicycle wheels, semi-truck hubs, school bus mirrors, metal goblets, ball bearings, steel rods, wood, aluminum sheeting, milkshake mixer cups, oil filters, waffle-iron parts, and the occasional Mickey Mouse piggy bank or metal duck — anything that retired farmer Vollis Simpson had salvaged over the years and left out in his fields in case it ever came in handy.
“[I] just go to the junkyard and see what I could get,” he told The New York Times in 2010. “Went by the iron man, the boat man, the timber man. Ran by every month. If they had no use for it, I took it.”
He collected air conditioner fans, ceiling fans, industrial fans — the biggest is 25 feet across — and covered them with reflective pieces of highway signs that he cut by hand, so that when light hits them at night, the sculptures dazzle like fireworks or church windows that spin. He swears he didn't measure, didn't weigh, yet each windmill, as he called them, moves with engineered precision.
