Learn About Windmills
Windmills use as a water draining device is first mentioned in written documents about in 1414. Windmills used for the processing of grain have existed there for 200 years before that. The oldest known documents that mentions a windmill are the privileges offered to the city’s bourgeois, in 1274. The feudal senior could give the right of building a windmill, to constrain the workers to bring cereals to his windmill, and to forbid the construction or the planting of trees near the windmill for ensuring the strongest wind.
In the following years, windmills spread over Holland. Old towers that used to be used for keeping gun powder were converted into mills. But the real development of Dutch windmills takes place at the end of the XVI century and the beginning of the next one. Windmills and the many uses started to be utilized more and more. They were built from heavy wood, brought in ships from heavily forested lands from around the Baltic Sea.
The most abundant and cheapest form of energy available to Dutchmen was wind power. Larger quantities of water can easily be drained using bigger and stronger windmills. That was absolutely essential because the land in Holland is in consistent danger of flooding. Many great cities like Amsterdam and Haarlem which are primarily located beneath sea level are under the constant threat of flooding. Using just 26 windmills, Beemster lake was entirely drained in about 1 year by the power of wind alone.
Around the year 1850, approximately 9000 windmills were functional in Holland, probably the greatest number that ever existed there. Post this time, the number of windmill begins to decrease. Only 2500 windmills remained by the end of the 19th century.
In 1920, an initiative for creating an association to protect the windmills was beginning to take shape. This association was born in 1923, in Amsterdam. As result of a petition the Dutch society of windmills wrote, in 1924 a letter to the minister of Education, Arts and Science that highlighted the importance of preserving these monuments. Other letters which were similar got sent in 1930 and 1939.
By the 1st of January 1961, an agreement has become operative and according to it, anyone who maintained a working windmill received a subvention from the state. Most of the times, a windmill owned by an old person, who can’t keep it in working conditions, is taken by the authorities and transformed into a historic monument. Usually, it shelters a museum or it becomes a center of receptions organized in the honor of foreign guests.
Holland greatly owes its existence to the windmills, because, with their help, water was kept from flooding the land and can now hold a growing population.
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