Harnessing the Wind

by

Wind.

Here on the coast the air is rarely still. Our weather is defined by wind and without it the bays and ocean would lie still and languid. Captain John Smith was one of the first to document our region’s capricious winds during his 1700 mile voyage of discovery along the Chesapeake Bay in 1608. For Smith and his companions, the wind could be a biblical hell.

“The wind and waters so much increased with thunder, lightning and rain that our foremast and sail blew overboard. Two days we were forced to inhabit these uninhabited isles, which for the extremity of gusts, thunder, rain, storms and ill weather we called Limbo.”

Between the Southern Appalachians and the coastal plain, there is nothing to brake the speed of the westerly winds. Eastward, nothing dampens the blows that sweep from across the Atlantic. For coastal dwellers, winds can be beneficial, refreshing, annoying, or destructive.

The power of wind was well known in ancient times. The early colonists first understood the beneficial aspects of the wind as it propelled their sailing ships westward towards the New World. As the early settlements became villages that later grew into towns and cities, residents relied on the wind to grind their grains and pump their water. The strength of the wind was ever-changing. To store it was impossible; to harness it was a challenge.

HARNESSING THE WIND

When we think about the windmills of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we may see them as quaint relics, but those first windmills were machines that helped herald the change from an agrarian society to the industrial age.

The first practical windmills were called panemones, which used sails that rotated in a horizontal plane around a vertical axis. Such windmills were widespread across the Middle East and Central Asia, eventually spreading to Europe and China. Up until that time, grain was ground by hand using mortars and pestles or by rude hand mills called quernes. Some of these hand mills were still in existence during the American Revolution and were called samp mills.

In other parts of the world, grain was ground between stones powered by a rotary mill drawn by horse or donkey walking round in a circle. Examples of animal-powered mills have been found in the ashes of Pompeii, which was destroyed in 79AD. None of these methods could process grain in large batches and so most households relied on quernes for their daily needs.

When those earliest colonists arrived in 1607, they had been raised primarily on Northern European wheat, barley and oats. It wasn’t long before they learned that nothing sustained them like Indian corn or maize. Well-suited to the climate, productive and easily grown, corn not only kept the settlers fed, but while it grew it also provided the colonists the extra time needed to cultivate the labor-intensive tobacco crops that made the Virginia experiment financially successful.

Despite the abundance of game and fish, the seventeenth century working class relied on cereals rather than meat, fish or vegetables for their protein. It was a diet we would find meager and monotonous. Though some colonists loathed corn, others embraced it, finding new and novel ways to diversify their dishes: hoecakes, grits, cornbread, pudding, porridge and chutney.

Regardless of whether one was grinding wheat, oats, barley or corn, all this grain had to be crushed or ground by hand. Using a quern, one person would spend up to two hours a day grinding grain for the average family. The benefits of mechanization were all too obvious. Ironically, the first windmill was not constructed in Virginia until 1621, when Governor and Captain General George Yeardley constructed a vertical English post mill on his Flowerdew Hundred Plantation in Prince George County.

By now, the vertical windmill had been in use in northwestern Europe since the twelfth century. The post mill is so named because of the large upright post on which the mill’s main structure is balanced. In this way, the mill can rotate to face the wind direction, an essential requirement for windmills to operate economically in regions where wind directions are variable. It was the ideal mill for the New World. With points of land jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay and the broad waters of tidal rivers providing unimpeded wind flow, these spots were ideal for vertical mills with tall sails.

While the earliest mills were generally small and tended to be located on private plantations, before long English post mills were common in many communities grinding meal and pumping water. During the late seventeenth century, commercial mills began to flourish as farmers grew wheat and exported flour.

The establishment of windmills frightened the Native Americans, who dreaded the rotating sails and described them as “their long arms and great teeth biting the corn in pieces.” Many tribes attributed the turning of the wheels to evil spirits.

WINDMILLS IN AMERICA

There were construction variations of vertical windmills that developed over time as regional preferences and technology changed. The early post mill could operate economically in coastal Virginia where wind directions are variable. In Williamsburg, the restored Robertson’s windmill on nearby Great Hopes Plantation is a fine example.

A variation on this design was a hollow-post mill, the post on which the body is mounted was hollowed out to accommodate the drive shaft. Hollow-post mills driving scoop wheels were used to drain wetlands for farming.

The smock mill was an even later development, where the heavy masonry tower was replaced by a wooden framework, called the “smock,” which was often thatched, boarded or covered with other regional materials. The smock was commonly of octagonal shape, though there are examples with different numbers of sides. The lighter weight made smock mills practical in areas where soil was less stable or sandy.

The windmill in Yorktown was an example of a smock mill. The earliest documented image of the Yorktown Windmill is from a drawing produced by an officer aboard his ship in the mid-1700s. The artist meticulously detailed the landscape on both sides of the York River, and the waterfront windmill is clearly noted.

The 1784 painting by Charles W. Peale is entitled Washington and his Generals at Yorktown and depicts Washington and his commanders following the siege of Yorktown. While the windmill is not the central focus of the painting, its inclusion shows that the mill survived in its original location from its construction in 1711 through the end of the American Revolution.

Windmill Point Road in Lancaster County is mentioned prominently on road signs and historical markers. Assuming a windmill must have existed on a point of land where the Rappahannock River empties into the Chesapeake Bay, no evidence of it remains.

THE MILLER

Of course, no windmill could function without the miller. Often portrayed as an uneducated oaf with more brawn than brains, millers and millwrights possessed a variety of skills. The miller’s detracting image came about in medieval times.

Written between 1387 and 1400 in England, Geoffrey Chaucer’s bawdy Canterbury Tales is a collection of fictional stories presented as part of a story-telling contest among pilgrims on their way from London to visit Canterbury’s martyred Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine. As Controller of Customs, Justice of Peace, Clerk of the King’s work and member of Parliament, Chaucer was an esteemed public official. Canterbury Tales draws heavily upon negative stereotypes regarding the lower and working class, including the miller. Like Chaucer, much of the upper class looked down on those who provided bread for their butter.

In fact, windmills required not just strength but practical experience of complex and demanding machinery, knowledge of the wind and weather and the ability to calculate and regulate the flow of various grains to the millstones. There were no gauges or dials to assist him as he constantly adjusted the various mechanisms. The miller often relied on his senses — smell, sound, touch and taste — for signs of trouble. When the mill was idle, the miller was not. Instead, he was replacing and repairing the sails, training his apprentices, and doing the bookkeeping.

WESTWARD HO!

As nineteenth-century settlers moved westward, they discovered a flat landscape where rainfall declined and was unreliable. The land was fertile however, and ideal for growing grain and feeding livestock, if only they had water. Along the riverbanks, water lay not far underground, and so early wells were dug by hand 8-30 feet deep and the water drawn up by buckets. This soon proved laborious and costly.

Compared to the humid coast, The Great Plains is a region of high winds. So, smock mills were built to take advantage of prairie winds, but on the treeless plains wood to construct them was expensive. The credit for making the first steel windmill is ascribed to a paten

t granted in 1872 to J.S. Risdon of Genoa, Illinois. The ‘Iron Turbine’ reached the market in 1876 and had a profound impact on American windmill design and manufacture. While the number of wooden mills continued to increase until WWI, afterwards steel mills quickly surpassed them. Soon, American windmills were being exported all over the world.

When it became clear that the world’s coal and oil deposits were finite, alternative sources for generating electricity were sought. The oil crisis of 1973 renewed interest in wind energy as the price of oil skyrocketed. As far back as the 1890s, scientists had been experimenting with windmill-powered generators. One of the first places where windmills were connected to the electrical grid was in the Netherlands.

As the price of oil fluctuates, modern on and off-shore wind turbines are once again proving that harnessing the power of the wind may again touch off another industrial revolution as the world struggles to free itself from fossil fuel dependency.