The windmill is an icon of Americana. This charming fixture, which shows up frequently in art and literature, played a key role in America’s ability to settle the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And a big part of the American windmill story took place in the small Illinois town of Batavia. A western suburb of Chicago with a current population of about 26,000, Batavia adopted the nickname “Windmill City” because it was home to six windmill manufacturing companies from the 1860s to the 1950s.
Today, Batavia visitors can see a collection of the windmills that were built there. They are displayed near the Batavia Government Center and along the Fox River. As part of a community project initiated by the late Bob Popeck in 1994, 17 windmills were brought back to Batavia and restored to create the display. This windmill collection was named an ASME Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in September 2013.
A brief history
In the mid-1800s, the rapid expansion of the U.S. railway system was underway, requiring water to supply the steam engines. In addition, ranchers in the arid west needed a way to draw water from the ground. Windmills were critical to meet these needs and, as a result, the windmill industry took off.
Connecticut native Daniel Halladay was a leader in the advancement of windmills. His patented invention of the self-regulating wind engine in 1854 revolutionized the industry and inspired the launch of many windmill companies.
Halladay was a founder of the U.S. Wind Engine & Pump Company (USWE), the nation’s first mass-production windmill factory, which opened in Batavia in 1857. Halladay and others started windmill factories in Batavia because it was a good location for manufacturing and distributing their products to the midwestern and western parts of the country.
In the years after USWE set up shop, five other windmill manufacturers of various sizes opened in Batavia. The major ones were USWE, Challenge Wind Mill & Feed Mill Company, and Appleton Manufacturing Company. The three smaller companies were Batavia Wind Mill Company, Snow Manufacturing Company, and Danforth Windmill Company. By 1951, all the companies had closed, as electric water pumps had largely replaced windmill water pumps by that time.
But in the 1880s, Halladay’s self-regulating windmills could be seen on farms all over the Midwest and the West, where the technology was used to pump water for livestock, crops, and more. They were also popping up along railroad tracks, where water towers and windmills were needed about every 20 miles to refill the water tanks of steam locomotives.
“Self-regulating” meant the windmill would automatically turn its four variable-pitch blades away from a strong wind, rather than spinning so fast that centrifugal acceleration would destroy it. “The ingenious mechanical design of the wind-engine system of gears and linkages made efficient use of centrifugal and gravitational forces in controlling the windmill blades’ resistance to air flow by automatically adjusting blade orientation to the wind to provide nearly constant wheel speed in variable air velocities,” according to an ASME brochure about the Batavia windmills that was released for the landmark ceremony in 2013.
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Read the rest of the history in the ASME link.