OS Ranch Steer Roping & Art Exhibit, October 2-4, 1982 Page: 12
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~41 LA large-diameter "Eclipse Railroad Pattern" windmill on the XIT Ranch at
the turn of the century. Photograph courtesy Panhandle-Plains Historical
Museum.T. Lindsay Baker*
For well over a century windmills have constituted
one of the major elements of water supply on
Southwestern ranches, their tall towers being land-
marks through the region. Wherever one goes from
Texas to California, these sentinels stand surveying
the plains and deserts as they provide water to stock
in areas that often even the ranchers visit only occa-
sionally.
Windmills are not new to ranching in the
Southwest. They are known to have been used for
stock watering in Texas as early as 1860, but they
did not begin appearing in significant numbers until
the mid-1880's. By the turn of this century they
came to be used by the thousands, especially after
the marketing of livestock changed from a per head
basis to a per pound basis. The farther that cattle
had to walk to water, the less they weighed, so it
made good economic sense for the ranchmen to drill
more wells and erect more windmills, thus indirectly
keeping fat on their stock.
The Southwest may be the home of windmills to-
day, but it is not their birthplace. The first successful
self-governing windmill, one that would automatically
turn to face the wind and which would control the
speed of its wheel without human attention, was in-
vented in New England. Its developer was Daniel
Halladay, co-owner of machine shops at Ellington,
Connecticut, who began working on the idea about
1853. Having succeeded in his venture, in 1854 he
patented his new invention and with others began its
manufacture in New England. The market for the
mills, however, was in the Midwest, with its
thousands of farms, and in 1863 Halladay and his
associates shifted their factory operations to Batavia,
Illinois, just west of Chicago.
*T. Lindsay Baker is the Curator of Science and Technology
at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas. He
is the author of approximately two dozen articles on the history
of water resource development in the arid and semiarid
Southwest, as well as being co-author of Water for the
Southwest: Historical Survey and Guide to Historic Sites (New
York: American Society of Civil Engineers, 1973). He also is the
author of the first documented general history of American wind-
mills, A Field Guide to American Windmills, which now is in
press at the University of Oklahoma Press.compliments of Mr. & Mrs. George R. Brown, Houston, Texas
1
'W NDMILLS AND SOUTHWESTERN RANCHING
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OS Ranch Steer Roping and Art Exhibit Committee. OS Ranch Steer Roping & Art Exhibit, October 2-4, 1982, book, 1981; Post, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth556362/m1/14/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Post Public Library.