Windmills

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WINDMILLS

WINDMILLS. In the seventeenth century windmills stood in what are now New York and northern New Jersey, but they did not become a feature of American life until after the Civil War, and then generally in the western United States. The occupation of lands beyond the belt of regular rain, springs, streams, and shallow underground

water tapped by hand-dug wells made windmills a necessity. Well-drilling machinery and practical mills made their use possible. Popularized in the 1870s, windmills came to dot the prairie states and the rough, arid, or semiarid lands beyond. They provided a way, before the invention of the gasoline engine, to supply water for personal and agricultural use.

The windmill became common only after barbed wire had made the control of waterings by private owners possible. It turned tens of millions of acres of waterless land into farms. It made garden patches and shade and fruit trees possible, even during the most parching droughts. It also brought running water into homes.

Nonetheless, the use of windmills to provide water in dry western states has not been an unmitigated good. For instance, since the 1940s, farmers from northern Texas to southern South Dakota have depended on water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate their crops. Although this massive subterranean aquifer is the largest in the world, those who rely on it are consuming its water at a faster rate than the aquifer can recharge it. Therefore, this practice is not sustainable. Calling the transformation of arid territory into farms "land reclamation" falsely implies that the so-called Great American Desert served no purpose before irrigation. The fact that an area does not easily support humans and their preferred crops does not render it worthless. A more sustainable use for windmills is in the production of electricity from wind power, an area in which Denmark excelled during the early 2000s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hills, Richard Leslie. Power from Wind: A History of Windmill Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

MacDonnell, Lawrence J. From Reclamation to Sustainability: Water, Agriculture, and the Environment in the American West. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999.

Opie, John. Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land. 2d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Rowley, William D. Reclaiming the Arid West: The Career of Francis G. Newlands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

J. FrankDobie/a. e.