Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Lubbock Windmill Museum and role of windmills in West Texas
July 16, 2003

When I see a windmill, I think of West Texas’ bold, strong-willed, honest, plain-talking and practical women, and men with crackpot delusions. In 1925, Dorothy Scarborough wrote “The Wind,” set in the early settlement days just after the buffalo were gone from the Llano Estacado and the Rolling Plains. Letty is an immigrant who can never adapt to the wind, while Cora derives her strength and beauty from the landscape. Letty is unwilling to find the beauty around her, unable to give up her memories of her southern upbringing as a standard of a civilized landscape. Cora learned of the lushness that rain brings, and the boundless energy of the land’s stored-up vigor that awaits rain or irrigation. She exemplifies the strength defined by active acceptance and appreciation, not the passive strength that comes from endurance or resistance of stress.

The wind is what gave Billie Wolfe the impetus to eventually create a lasting legacy for Llaneros. Born in Fort McKavett, she grew up budding pecan trees for her father, the founder of what became the chain of Wolfe Nurseries (after he sold the original nursery in Stephensville.) Ms. Wolfe taught in the home economics department of Texas Tech for years. She photographed area pioneer sites and rural homes for her classes. In doing so, she noticed the windmills that once graced almost every rural west Texas home. Many were not working, in a state of disrepair, or even fallen down. She began documenting the windmills, and as her interest increased, traveled the nation in recording the history of windmills in the United States. She collected and restored windmills, as well.

Up in Lubbock, just east of the four lane Hiway 27 in Yellowhouse Draw in MacKenzie Park is the American Wind Power Center in the Tom and Evelyn Lineberry Windmill Park. It exists because of Billie Wolfe. Her fascinated passion inspired other folks to help her establish a windmill museum. The City of Lubbock leases 28 acres to the center, and also donated 150,000 bricks for the brick and steel perimeter fence. Several dozen windmills grace the eastern slope of the draw, and inside the barn-like structure of the Center are many more. Over 100 have been restored for display, including some of the earliest examples of water-pumping windmills made in the United States.

I grew up with a windmill. When my folks settled on 5 acres out in the country in 1944, it already had a windmill and wooden tank and 200 yards of underground line that led to the little three room house on the property. In the most recent issue of Stanton’s “Old Sorehead Gazette” editor Bud Lindsay wrote about the Martin County Museum’s old Eclipse windmill, “to some, the creaking of a windmill on a summer night was, or is, music to the ears.” Our windmill was so far away that we could hear the windmill only when it was spinning fast.

When we moved to my present homesite in 1981 and built a new house, we took our windmill with us and put it only 100 feet from the house, so we could listen to its music through the open windows. My parents, growing up long before the invention of airconditioning, had by necessity learned how to “live inside the heat,” and as a result, we had none of that “new-fangled, money-wasting” refrigerated air-conditioning until 1996 when advanced age finally disrupted their internal thermostats.

Windmills and their adjoining stocktanks were once gathering places. The late Sue Corson told me of the swimming parties of the 1940’s at the Billy Houston ranch in Glasscock County. Out in the chittamwood, hackberry, and soapberry forest in the draw right below the old homeplace, Billy’s dad had built a concrete stocktank big enough in which to swim laps.

“We used to go skinny-dipping,” – Sue liked to tell the story -- “but we told folks we went skinny-dipping more than we really did, just to shock the old folks in that day.” She cackled with her gutsy raspy laugh when I told her I first learned of the sweet delights of woman-kind in the shade of hackberries at a windmill on the Buchanan ranch. Yep, windmills and west Texas women – oh yeah!

Windmills are important markers of the history of the Llano Estacado. The other day I had a group of 4-H kids come down from Littlefield (northwest of Lubbock) to spend the day at the Sibley Nature Center. One of the kids lived out at the old headquarters area of the Yellowhouse Ranch. He asked me if I knew about the ranch’s famous windmill of 100 years ago. Major Littlefield used to test his prospective cowboys by asking them to climb the 120-foot tall windmill tower and grease its works.

Nelson Morris, the first owner of the “C” Ranch to the northwest of Midland, was the first rancher in the area to install windmills on every other section of land. Morris was a creative man during the times of Anglo settlement (late 1880’s to late 1890’s) on the Llano Estacado. He was also the first to completely fence his ranch, after seeing how a drift fence kept cattle off of his property during blue northers.

Francis Divers, a rancher along the Pecos, heard of Morris’s windmills and bought two. The windmills did not pump fast enough to supply the overstocked herds, so cowboy Bill Oden climbed up and took out every other blade and lengthened the pump stroke two inches. His modifications doubled the output of a windmill, and became the standard for all west Texas. With Oden’s modifications every townsperson that could afford one, got one. Every store on old Abilene Street (now Main Street) had its own windmill. Midland became known as “The Windmill City.”

General Robert George Dyrenforth (although he never was a general), was an attorney, and onetime commissioner of the U.S. patent office. He learned that many Civil War veterans believed that rain fell after cannon battles. In 1890 Secretary of Agriculture J.M. Rusk persuaded Congress to appropriate nine thousand dollars to experiment with “explosive rainmaking.”

Dyrenforth managed to get himself named as the director of the project. Enduring an 18-month drought and running out of grass, rancher Morris invited Dyrenforth a chance to prove the theory. On August 5th, 1891, Dyrenforth arrived in Midland, along with several professors and Edward Powers, author of “War and the Weather.” On the evening of August 17th twelve hours of balloon explosions and ground explosions ripped the west Texas skies apart.

At dawn, the skies were clear, but at 5 p.m. a drenching rain forced Dyrenforth and assorted observers to shelters, and the jubilant Dyrenforth drove back to Midland through six miles of flooded road. At Morris’ ranchhouse, two-hundredths of an inch fell. On August 25th the experiment was repeated, and fourteen hours later another thunderstorm rolled through the area. Despite the resulting media frenzy in the national magazines and big city newspapers of the day, other local ranchers were not impressed – “it always rains in late August.”

Windmills are more of a sure thing than making rain with explosives. Long may they spin! And may the wind energy windmills spin as long!