Journal Entries:
"01-21-88 Norwich trip. Through Clonmel and west on 71st street to Block ~327 out of Wichita is an open gear steel "Monitor." It belongs to the people living 1/2 miles north.
Made at Evansville, Wisconsin Also on 71st between ClonmeI and Block #327 are 3 or 4 open gear "Woodmanse"
mills with no wheels. 2 I/2 miles west of Norwich road on 71st are 3 each 3 legged towers stored together on the ground. Also found 6 ft. open gear Currie with no tail and fair wheel. It is 13 mi. west of Haven. Belongs to guy who lives in Hutch. Got his phone
______________"
Such are the notes we keep in our log book so we can remember where windmills are located that we might need later.
We are both 72 years old and are retired but we use gathering windmills as a hobby and to give us an excuse to explore over Kansas, northern Oklahoma, northern Texas and eastern New Mexico. On trips taking one day we alternate taking a pickup and driving only the back roads looking for old windmills. The passenger buys breakfast and lunch.
On extended trips we make up a "kitty" for expenses.
We look for the older windmills made before and/or soon after the turn of the century. Most are out of use and our only hope is to find the remains in the farm or ranch junk pile. These are what are known as "open gear" mills inasmuch as the mechanism for raising and lowering the pump rod is a simple round flange on the interior end of the fan spindle. From this flange extends a pin which drives a pitman fastened to a pin extending from a pump rod enclosing a slide. Each
revolution of the windmill wheel produces one stroke of the pump rod. Maintenance of these mills called for lubrication of the main bearing shaft and the pump rod slide on
a weekly basis. This required climbing the tower and applying the lubricant directly.
Brand names of these old mills included the "Star", "Eclipse", "Leader",
"Monitor", "Standard", and "Woodmanse". All had wooden wheel sections which required constant maintenance of tightening, painting and general repair. The main bearings and the slide housing had to have a new babbitt every few years and this required removing the wheel and engine from the tower.
A few companies made mills following these old mills that had meshed gears to gain power advantages but still had to be lubricated often
These were the "Currie", "Monitor", "Elgin", and others.
Then came the oil bath' mills which continue to be in use and are being manufactured until present days. These have meshed gears running in a reservoir
of oil and require lubrication check only annually We don't look for these
"Aermotors", "Dempsters", etc. because there are so many of them and people want something old and simple to restore.
One would think that a four legged windmill tower would be stronger than a three legged tower. However, we find four legged towers
blown over all over the country but have yet to see a three legged tower blown over. No doubt there is an engineering reason for this but it seems odd that it
would be a fact. A person could probably run a bunch of stress coefficients through a computer and verify this fact. All we know is what we have seen in the air and scattered on the ground. On windmill towers three
is better that four.
We had to learn how to hunt windmills. Our best clue is to see an empty tower at a farm or ranch or in an open pasture. An empty tower indicates one important fact--there has been a mill and it is no longer
in use at this location. The next move is to find someone on the place who can tell us the cause of the empty tower and where the mill components are.
Finding the person who knows anything about the mill often becomes a problem.
No one stays at home in the country anymore. The dogs and cats are there and are always excited for anyone to come through the front gate. In most cases they only want something to eat or a pat on the head. Sometimes the dogs put on a big show especially if someone is at home. If no one is home, the dogs bark pretty loud until they get a kind word. The male dogs always have to check the tires and pick up ail the messages that dogs back down the road have contributed. Then they go back and lay down in the shade. The breed of dogs we have learned to be cautious about is the chow--especially if it has a purple tongue. They can get pretty vicious. There is a relatively new breed of dogs called 'blue heelers" that have come into the country--seems like in the last 20 years Everybody says they are good watch dogs but they haven't appeared much different to us than all the others.
Milligan has been nipped twice but he needs more practice in talking to them. If after finding no one home, the dogs, the cats and the chickens sometime follow a person clear out to the pickup. This
is especially true late in the day if they have been by themselves a long time and are hungry and lonesome.
We stopped in a pasture in southeast Colorado one time to take pictures of some pretty horses and a big jackass came
charging at me and I just barely got in the pickup. Then he tried to stick his head in the
window He was either protecting his remuda of mares or was wanting a lump of sugar. We went on down the road right away. He was a good guard
animal.
As mentioned previously, finding anyone at home is one of our biggest problems Most
couples both work in town somewhere near. The old folks nave moved to town and through most of the day no one is home There may be two or three pickups and cars sitting around but that doesn't mean a thing. If we have good evidence that an old mill may be on
the place we usually check around the neighborhood and find someone at home and then we try to obtain the prospect's name and maybe a phone number where we can locate him later.
In southeastern New Mexico we find lots of ranches where the people living there don't speak or seem to understand our language. Sometimes they will
pronounce a nearby town which indicates the owner, or their boss, lives away from the ranch. These people appear to be of Mexican and/or Indian descent and we suppose they are employees of the ranch. They offer little help along the windmill line.
Lots of people are too young to have experienced the old type windmills so they are not of much assistance. We always try to get permission to look over the junk piles and hedgerows and there we find a lot of our mills. We never prowl around a place if no one is home--no matter how isolated the place might be. If we can't get permission to look around we just drive away.
In New Mexico one time we drove up to a place and from our pickup we could see old, precious windmill parts sticking out of an iron pile. No one was home although it was evident someone lived there. So we back tracked to a place where we had talked to a man and he told us that. he imagined the people were at the community cemetery that Sunday as everybody was up there getting the cemetery cleaned up for Memorial Day We went back to the nearby small town and found out where the cemetery was and sure enough found the man who lived on the place where we had seen the parts. He was helping put some new fence
posts in around the cemetery. He was around 45 years old but said he couldn't sell any parts before checking with his mother. So that put
a "quietus" to that effort for that trip anyway.
We went back the next year and found he and his mother both there. We offered to buy the old parts and again he said he would have to check
with his mother. He came back out and said she didn't want to get rid of any of the old parts. She and her husband had been the original owners of the land since 1912 and she just hated to turn loose of any of the old junk We in turn made him a good offer and asked him to go check again but he came back with the same answer He said if we wanted to go talk to her we could so I went in the house with him and talked a while with the lady She said they had five mills of the same kind at one time and she just wanted to keep them around for sentimental purposes. So I offered to sort out one complete set of parts and she could keep them and possibly sell us the remainder. She finally agreed to
let us buy one set of parts only We were lucky to get those.
I carry flower seeds in little packages to give away to people all over the country so as we left
I gave the son a package of these. Then I told Milligan that I had used the flower seed to negotiate the sale. If we are back over in New Mexico next year maybe we can buy another set from the lady.
On this same trip we had found an old mill beside another mill. We found out the owner's name but couldn't track him down that day. We did get his phone number and after we got back to Kansas I called him and bought the old mill over the phone and sent him a check. Then on the second trip down in that country we couldn't find him. He had cashed the check so we went ahead and got the mill by digging half of it out of sand We still haven't met him eyeball to eyeball.
We have always had good luck buying mills over the phone. We bought two New Mexico mills and a visible gas pump one Sunday P.M. from three different owners living in Amarillo, Tex. After negotiating the prices they trusted us enough to give us an OK to pick the stuff up and send them a check after we got back home in Kansas.
We stopped at one ranch in northern New Mexico and asked about old mills and the rancher said he didn't have any at the home place but that he had a place over in a draw west a couple of miles and that there were some old mill parts laying
around there we could have if we wanted them He said there was only one qualification we would have to abide by.
He said he and his cowboys were going to be bringing a bunch of steers across the country that morning and would be coming by the place he had told us about. He cautioned us to be on the look out for them and to get behind the house when they came by so we
wouldn't "booger" the steers. We drove through some gates and found the place and what a place it was. It was an old, old two story rock ranch house and had three large rooms downstairs. It had three large gables on the roof. There were some rock building scattered around with no roofs. There were rock corrals in several places.
We found several good windmill parts we could use. About noon we could hear cowboys hollering and we saw the herd coming We grabbed our lunch sacks and sat around on the sunny side of the one of the old buildings and ate our lunch as the steers trailed by. This place could not be seen from any direction for over a half mile. It had no
electric or phone wires running to it. The newest magazine we found was a "Colliers" 1947. We were there in 1986. If only that old ranch house could
talk!
At one place in New Mexico while looking for a mill, we found an old horse powered feed grinder The tenant on the land said we would have to contact the owner in Chillocathe, Texas. We called her and made a deal for it and sent her a check after we got
home. I think we sent her $15.00 After hauling it around to two or three machine shows we finally sold it at an auction for $3.00--three dollars.
Before the days of handy electricity ranchers used pump jacks to hook on to the (sucker) pump rod and pump water when the winds failed to blow enough over a period of a few days and the windmill consequently didn't turn. These pump jacks were activated by one cylinder gasoline engines that were kept running night and day to maintain enough water supply until the winds picked up again. There is a small demand for these old engines now days because people are restoring them and showing them at
antique machinery shows. We have managed to find a few around old windmill sites.
We travel only the back roads--off the pavement--and then the back roads off the back roads. We don't consider we have had a successful day unless we have run into at least one "dead end" on a road. We travel these roads because we think there are more opportunities to find our things where other hunters may not have been. Too, occasionally, we find an abandoned community dump ground we can search through and though we may not find windmill parts we often find scrap brass, copper and aluminum which we take home and sell to apply on the gasoline bill. We never get in a hurry regardless of where we are or what we are doing. We figure we have the rest of our lives to spend on this job so we had just as well take our time and get as much out of it as we can.
On the back roads we often end up in open pastures where the air seems fresher and the sun brighter and the whole world more peaceful. In these open pastures we have to keep on the alert because often the only improvements for miles will be a windmill off in a draw maybe a half mile from the
dirt road we are already on. We try to look around the base of these mills for remains of a mill preceding them.
Probably the best part of our operation is the meeting of such interesting and, more often than not, friendly people. It seems all generations have a small fascination with windmills so it is easy to discuss our business with most people But the special characters we meet are the spice that keep our efforts interesting.
On a return trip from delivering some mills to California we ran into one of these characters All the trip we had been looking at every farm or ranch beside the road to see if we could see any old windmills or gasoline engines. Lane City is only two or three miles west of Ely, Nevada and between the two towns we saw an old farm looking place at the edge
of an old ghost town. There was a fair sized collection of iron and salvage around the place so we pulled in. It was an accumulation of car bodies, shacks, pens,
shrubbery, etc., all mixed together to kind of blend with itself.
One building looked to be a residence and Milligan went to the door and knocked. An elderly lady came to the door and Milligan asked if the "man of the place" was around. She answered that he was supposed to be home soon. She also said she was in the middle of a long distance phone call and didn't have time to talk anymore.
It was late in the day so we went on into Ely and got a room, cleaned up, ate supper and drove back out to the interesting place to see if the man was home. We had no sooner got back on the highway when we saw a huge cloud of black smoke rising out of the vicinity of where we were going The closer we got to our destination the more it looked like the smoke was originating from the place we were checking out.
Sure enough, when we got back out there a big fire was going full blast at the rear of the house. A 3ft. x 6ft. x 8ft. long vat was sitting on top of a
framework directly over the fire and a man was feeding cardboard boxes and old tires under the vat and onto the fire. A terrible odor was wafting everywhere and it wasn't an odor from the fire materials. It was a strong obnoxious odor resembling raw sewage being cooked on a stove-a very sickening odor indeed.
The man saw us drive in and walked away from the fire to come talk to us. He didn't have anything along our line. We inquired as to what he
was burning and this is part of what he told us:
"l get all the garbage and waste from all the restaurants and grocery stores in town and bring it out here and dump it in that big vat on the fire over there. I gather
all day, cook it for 2 hours in the afternoon and then let it cool all night. Next morning I skim off all the grease that has come to the top and put the
skimming in 55 gallon barrels and sell it once a week to a truck that comes by. The slop that is left I feed to my 75 head of pigs which I sell off about every
10 weeks"
We asked him if the sale of the skimmed of grease paid him much and he said "there is a state law that makes me cook
all raw foods fed to hogs so I have to cook it ail anyway. I just skim off the grease as part of the operation and count it as hog income"
(All this time we were about to gag due to the terrible odor that was floating everywhere)
He went on to say he had a man hired who brought the garbage out from town and when we asked about the dozen or more sets of overalls and shirts hanging around on the barn doors he said they belonged to the man he hired to do some of the work. They were
all very slick with grease and dirt and it's hard to figure out how and by whom they were used. But they were hanging around all over the place in sets--a shirt and pair of overalls hanging on separate nails.
We went over and looked at his hogs. They were in the 75 to 100 pound range for
size and were busy rooting around trying to get to the side of the fence where the man evidently poured the cooled off slop every day All over the ground and about six inches deep around the outside fence were
small bones--"T" bones, round steak bones, short rib bones--bones of all kinds left by cafe customers 'and going to the garbage barrel.
Surprisingly, the man didn't grind them up and sell them for bone meal.
We finally got the man to walk and talk with us--down wind-- and he told us he was a painter now by trade. He was, for a long time,
a miner but when the mines closed in the area he turned to painting houses. He was 84 years old and worked all day, every day but Sunday, and took care of the hogs as a sideline. He and his wife moved into the present house 62 years ago when they were first married. His wife's father owned the land and gave them the house. They had two grown children--one lived in California and
the other in Nevada. He seemed to be very happy. His natural teeth looked like a toothpaste commercial. His name was
Mario Venturino and he drove a Ford pickup.
Another unusual experience happened when we stopped one morning in a little settlement in southeast Kansas. There were only three families living there and there was no business district, post office, school, church or anything except the three places where these people lived and an old building which had been the general store. I asked at one of the houses if there were
any old windmills around anywhere and the lady said that one of the other families had brought in an old mill sometime back but never had put it up
So I went to that house afoot and as I approached I saw a woman and a half grown boy carrying a ladder from the old general store over to a barn.
I followed them to the barn and supposed they had seen me coming across about 90 degrees from their line of sight. But when I walked inside the
barn and spoke it nearly scared them to death. Anyway, the lady said the old windmill was down below the garden so she and I went down there but there was nothing but an old steel tower. She had no idea where the
working gears of the mill were and was not sure that the gears were with the mill when they bought it. She said they bought the tower with the idea of
making a TV antenna. So that ended the windmill business at the place.
I asked her if they had any old tools such as hammers, saws, wrenches, etc. She said she thought were were some over
in the old general store She and her son had been over there nailing down some sheet iron that was about to blow off when I first saw them coming across. I could visualize all kinds of good stuff in the old store but it ended up as nothing but
worthless junk.
Finding nothing there she said they had some old tools down in the green house. So we went down there and there was nothing but old garden tools such as hoes, rakes and shovels--all worthless
to me. There was an old toy pedal car there and I tried to buy it and this is when I first heard that she had a husband. She said she couldn't sell the pedal car without asking her husband and that he was out of the
states for a month.
I was ready to get away from the place when she said she thought there were some old tools in the house--their living quarters. So I followed her into the front room and she stood there a minute as if thinking and then went into an adjoining bedroom and said she thought the wrenches were in an old chest of drawers in there. I stood in the doorway as she went through about six drawers turning the contents upside down before she finally said she guessed her husband had slipped them out and sold them. That was enough for me. I left the
place and when I got out to the pickup my oldest son, who didn't know for sure where
I was, was waiting for me. When I told him my story, he just kind of grinned and said it "sounded like a good story." I couldn't tell whether he believed me or not but
I had told all the story. He had spent his time that morning checking out the old railroad tracks for date nails.
Another person who left a humorous impression was a retired rancher in southeast New Mexico. We had bought one mill from him that
day and as soon as he felt the green money cross his hand it helped him remember where another old mill might be on one of his "other" places.
We took off two or three miles across the country to an old vacant set of improvements. He got out to open a gate and I got
out to help him as he was having a coughing spell. He started telling me about how bad the water was on this place. He was cussing the oil companies for spoiling so
much of the water in that part of the country. This is a cleaned up quotation he made without a smite and without
missing a motion toward opening the gate: "This water on the place is so bad that the old cows come in here to get a drink and turn right around and lick their a__
to get the taste out of their mouth!" I didn't tell Milligan about it until we got back and let him out. Then we had a big laugh about it.
Most people like to stop and talk when we find them in the country. The only exception is when a storm is blowing in and they are loading feed for livestock. Then they don't want to visit around much.
It is around the local store or cafe or the post office they usually will take time to talk. There is a little grocery store-filling station-post office operation in one building at Gladstone, New Mexico where the highway traffic is not very heavy and all in all there is a very peaceful atmosphere in the little grocery. The lady keeps a card table and chairs set up toward the back of the main room and she keeps a few groceries that fit into the cold lunch category. A person can buy a piece of
longhorn cheese, some vienna sausages, sardines, an onion, pickles, pop or milk and a loaf of bread or box of crackers and sit down at the card table and have a "stick to the rib type meal." She even has a hot pot of coffee ready most of the time. If your hands are dirty and/or your wife had rather someone else fixed lunch, the lady will make sandwiches and serve at the card table. She also has a couple of beds at the back that can be rented. There is a shower back there too. Milligan and I have stayed there and enjoyed it. We have picked up some pretty good "leads" on windmill locations there. We have also used the back yard to haul our junk into as we accumulate it from day to day. She is just a very nice and understanding lady. She is not the postmistress--another lady does that in the adjoining
room.
In our traveling around over the country we try to have breakfast at Hardees or
McDonalds where we can drive through and eat on the run. However, we have some special places where we like to eat if we are in their neighborhood at meal time.
One especially good place to get good hotcakes is at Peabody, Kansas. The cafe--I can't remember ever seeing a name of it--is in an old bank
building and the entrance is on the corner and up several steps--like banks and churches were built in the early years. There is a nice, clean cafe there that caters mostly to the local people--not very fancy, not all dolled up, pretty
low keyed and the lady who owns it and serves as waitress, cashier and cook most of the time is also very pleasant and acts like she might remember us as having been there before. The hot cakes are always hot and fluffy and the lady puts out plenty of oleo and syrup and keeps the coffee cups full.
The cafe has only one toilet and one feature about it is that one remembers after a time or two of going in and closing the door and fumbling around
trying to find the light switch or the string to the pull switch is the fact that the light switch is on the wail outside of
the door and you must turn the light on before you go in. One nice feature about this lighting arrangement is that the restroom is always lighted up when you go in and is still lit up when you leave. Don't know if this
is a feature common to all unisex restrooms or not. Anyway, it is an item which in addition to the good hot cakes, makes the cafe somewhat quaint and unique.
Another unusual cafe is in Durham, Kansas. It is operated by a couple up in the years in age with the lady doing the cooking and the man taking customer orders and waiting on the tables plus holding down the cash register. We have always liked the fresh rolls the lady bakes every morning and sets out on the counter and then the man serves directly out of the baking pan. He is a pretty much down to earth individual and once when a young whipper-snapper type man came in and ordered ham and eggs and said he wanted the eggs "over easy" the director in general informed him right then and there that he would get the eggs just
how ever the wife fixed them. That ended the negotiations about the eggs.
In Winfield, Kansas, we used to try to eat breakfast at a small little diner type cafe operated by only one man. He was the manager, cook, waiter and cashier combined. There were only about twelve stools in the place and no tables but the food was real good and reasonably priced. The stools were spaced around a "U" shaped counter and customers could take inventory of the shelving under the top of the of the opposite side of the "U"--items such as paper napkins, ketchup, mustard, cups, glasses, ash trays, and all kinds of other items--such as light bulbs, crackers, aprons, paper towels, toothpicks, etc., etc.
It all made interesting viewing while waiting on our order. The last time we were there was after driving down from Wichita early one morning. We pulled in to park and the little cafe was gone and nothing remained except a pile of ashes. The "White Lily" was no more.
Jack Rooney is foreman of a ranch not far from Gladstone, New Mexico. His ranch leases pasture for the season to cattlemen with steers
to graze. The steers are hauled in by truck in April and graze until mid October. They come in weighing 450 pounds and leave weighing close to 825 or 850 pounds. Jack's job is to keep them within the fences and provide them with good handy
water. He and his wife "Ginney", work together all season taking care of the cattle, doctoring them, moving them around from pasture to pasture and water hole to
water hole. Water is the key ingredient and Jack is water man deluxe. He uses maybe one mill to water as many as three different pastures by pumping under ground from the mill or from a storage tank supplied by the mill. His mills are equipped with "stuffing boxes" which consist of a brass rod working in a brass cylinder and as the mill brings the water to the surface with an up stroke it is trapped by a check valve and forced into a side outlet by the down stroke of the mill. This pressure on the side outlet shoves water uphill or laterally as far as a mile to the other tanks or
reservoirs. Jack has a special sense of knowing what can be done with water pressures
There is some natural water in some of his pastures and he knows how to preserve that water and move it around also. Milligan and I have had several meals at Ginney's table and she is as much an expert there as she is out helping Jack chase cows and in opening gates all the time.
They have some neighbors, about twenty miles southeast of them, who treat us very nice also any time we show up at
thier ranch. They are the Doyle Prices who live south of Gladstone, N.M. Mrs. Price, Thelma, sets a very good round table in a dining room that has a
wood burning cooking range in one corner. It's a real treat to sit down at her table and have
mexican beans, cornbread (the real thing), ranch stew and peach cobbler topped of with very hot and very black coffee. They have helped us find some windmills. We also spent a couple of nights there parked in Milligan's camp trailer while waiting out a big rain so we could get back to the black top.
It is sometimes surprising what some people think of as windmills. Of course, a complete windmill would include the tower, the wheel, the engine (or gear box), the tail (or vane), and the pipe and sucker rods coming out of the ground. In northern Kansas one time we were inquiring about old windmills from a middle aged gentleman and he said he knew where there
was a wooden windmill. We were very enthused about it until we had driven two or three miles to find it was only a bare wooden tower. To the gentleman, though, it was a windmill.
One thing about it, however, most people know something about windmills and seem anxious to talk about them and are very helpful with directing us to them. Maybe one out of twenty leads proves to be partially fruitful. I don't recall us ever finding a complete mill on one location.
Possibly the biggest "put down" we have encountered, in trying to close a purchase, came in northern New Mexico when we came upon three Eclipse mills on one place These had been accumulated from the surrounding area by an elderly gentlemen who lived by himself in a very old set of
improvements. We "discovered" him and his assortment of junk late one fall evening as the sun was going down. We were
in a hurry to get to town (40 mile distance) but he was already home and had supper so time meant nothing to him. We tried to buy all three mills as a package but couldn't get him interested. Some guy from Dallas had previously been there and gave him
a very high figure as to the value of the mills. The only thing was he didn't buy any or offer to buy any. He was looking for a different brand. Anyway, we tried and tried to make a deal with the elderly owner and ended up offering to purchase just one mill as he seemed to have reason for hanging on to one set to restore
for himself. So, I proposed he sell us one set and pointed out he "wouldn't be hurt" because he would still have two sets remaining. He advised me he wasn't hurting before we arrived and he wouldn't be hurting if he kept all three sets. We bought no mills. He still has three pretty good sets of iron for 12'
Eclipse mills. He never did price them to us.
Our luckiest deal happened one fall day when we were up between Halstead and Hutchinson, Kansas. We were on a back dirt road and came upon a guy burning thistles out of
a bar ditch at an intersection. We asked him if he knew of any windmills for sale in that neighborhood and he said his father-in-law had one in his junk pile that he would probably sell. So we headed for the father-in-law's place, about 3 miles back down the road and the man got up from the dinner table and came out to see what we wanted. He showed us the mill and we bought it and loaded it. This deal used up only about
10 minutes from start to finish because the man was anxious to get back to the table. When we got home that night a guy from Mississippi called Milligan to close the deal on another mill and when Milligan told him about our find of the day the Mississippi guy said he would take it also. All this happened because of a faithful son-in-law out
burning tumble weeds on a lazy fall day when nothing much else was going on.
We had a guy call from Chowchilla, CA one time wanting some old windmills. He had a successful welding business and, too, he belonged to "Feed the Hungry International.". He wanted some old simple operating type mills he could fix up and take to Peru, S.A. to set up for poor natives to
irrigate their garden patches. We sold him four or five mills-no towers and made a deal with him to deliver the mills ourselves for whatever the commercial trucking bill would be. So we got a nice trip out of it and had some interesting experiences going and coming. The place in
Nevada previously mentioned where the man cooked the hog slop-was one of them We traded for a one cylinder gasoline engine out there in California and hauled it back. We also had a lot of fun rummaging through little desert town "dumps" looking for copper, brass and aluminum. We had a pretty mixed up load of things when we got home. We went out the southern route and came back the northern route. People at the motels where we stayed, going out and coming home, really looked our load of items over and probably wondered what those Kansas guys were doing hauling that stuff around. Our load of windmills with the wheels sticking straight up in the air in the back of the pickup looked
like a scene from "Grapes of Wrath'.
We have seen all kinds of home made signs in different parts of the country. There are always the usual "No Trespassing" and "No Hunting" signs but probably the most outstanding sign-in the home made class-was one at a gate going into a little ranch in New Mexico. It was 'free hand painted on horizontal boards of a gate and read: "I Don't Want Anyone In Here When I'm Not Here." "Joe".
Another sign on another New Mexico ranch gate said: "Beware, you are now on Holy Ground, The Lord Jesus and his Angels guard this Land. God is Love" Who would dare ignore either one of those signs? We turned around and drove back out to the road in each case.
Some people come and get their windmills themselves. One night we got a call from a North Carolina young man who was spending the night in Wichita. We had sent him one of our catalogs (3 pages) listing our mills and other rusty iron items and he wanted to look our merchandise over the next morning. So I met him at his motel parking lot and he had a Chevy
El Camino and an open bed "U Haul" trailer and was really loaded down with windmills and
wind chargers. He had been in western Texas gathering up what he could find. I didn't have much hope of selling him anything because he was so loaded up already. I offered to buy him and his wife breakfast but he said his wife wasn't in a very good mood and suggested instead that we go on out to Milligans to look at our mills.
We got out there and he looked the stock over and bought three mills quicker than we could hardly point them out. His wife had stayed in the
El Camino and when he went to it I heard some loud talking. All the while we were loading up, tying down, and red flagging the load his wife was really complaining about him buying windmills. He told me aside that she wasn't in favor of leaving North Carolina in the first place and she thought he was
crazy for buying "such old junk". How we got the mills on top of that load I'll never know. The rear bumper of the E1 Camino and the "U Haul" trailer hitch were barely clearing the ground. To think he had to make the
trip all the way back to North Carolina with such a load plus an agitated wife was bad. His check didn't bounce and we supposed he got home OK.
Another guy came from Fort Worth, Texas, in a compact Oldsmobile and picked up all the iron for a 10' Eclipse mill--no tower--and took it and his wife back home with him. Nothing stops those Texans.
We sometimes run an ad in "Windmill' Gazette", a windmill paper, and we offer our list of windmills and other items if the reader will send a self addressed and stamped envelope. We receive many requests. In fact, we have had requests from every state except Alaska and Hawaii.
We have had letters from Australia and Canada.
One lady from Michigan, who lived on Texas Avenue, wanted to know if we had a "Star" windmill she could put up in her yard. Somehow she knew
that "Star" mills have a big lone star emblem on the vane (or tail).
Lots of people have nostalgic attachments to old mills that were on their grandparent's
places and want a certain brand of mill like they had.
Few people really want to pump water. Most people want mills only for landscaping purposes. They may have a small acreage close to town and want a windmill in the air as a landmark, a conversation piece or as mentioned before, a piece of nostalgia.
So many times we find a mill we can use and then after tracking down the person who has the final say in whether to sell or not, we heap statements like these:
" I'd better keep it. We might use the parts on some of our other mills." (This would be impossible because mills working now are 100% different and have no common parts.)
"The kids want us to keep it."
"We want to keep it. I look out at it the first thing every morning and the last thing before I go to bed to see which way the wind is blowing."
"My insurance doesn't cover people climbing around on windmills."
"This place is tied up in an estate settlement and we can't get rid of anything."
"My wife's mother told her not to ever let anybody tear it down. was before my mother-in-law died."
We take these to be only secondary reasons used to camouflage the real reason, that being they consider an old mill to be a faithful partner that has helped them through many a hot, dry day and provided water for their family, livestock and possible a family garden. Consequently, they hate to let the mill go even though it may be inoperative and straddling a dry hole
But for now I guess I will keep on hunting them. It's a good outdoor experience and there are so many nice and interesting people in the country to meet and talk with. Too, sometimes, they have other items I can buy. I have bought on-the-cob popcorn, rhubarb, turnips, watermelons, squash, eggs, fresh corn, copper wire, fence posts, crock jars, cream cans, winches, oil company signs, grease buckets, old tools, horse shoes, padlocks, wire, rope, wagon wheels, hog oilers, feed grinders, gas pumps,
wind chargers, engines, tractor parts, old furniture, aluminum, pump jacks and etc
One guy had a bunch of chickens among which were three huge roosters. There was a Plymouth Rock (gray) rooster, a white Leghorn rooster and
a Rhode Island red rooster. He tried to sell us the gray one and the white one, but said he would have to keep the red one because all his geese were attached to the red one and followed him
all day long. We didn't buy any roosters, however, because we couldn't imagine our
wives picking and dressing chickens anymore--much lees roosters.
One thing for sure - the old mills are getting to be very scarce, if we ever have another big war they will be wiped out for sure in the resulting iron drive. That is what happened to many of them during World War I and
II.
HOMER C. BECK
2530 SENNETT
WICHITA. KANSAS 67211