How Windmills Made the American West Possible
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, that old windmill along the highway may look like a relic, but without it, westward expansion would have been nearly impossible. Before electricity and diesel engines, windmills pumped water for farms, ranches, railroads, and growing towns across the American frontier.
Our regular contributor, Jesse Edwards, shares the story of how windmills helped power settlement in the West, from early innovations in the 1800s to their lasting role in rural America, and why these iconic structures remain one of the most important tools in American history.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.2 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything |
| 0:19.0 | here on this show. |
| 0:20.3 | And now it's time for a look |
| 0:21.3 | back to a device that helped win the West. Here's Jesse with the story of windmill. |
| 0:28.7 | You can drive just about anywhere in America and find windmills if you're looking for it. |
| 0:33.2 | The old metal ones you see in paintings of Texas or the Midwest. From the novelty lawn ornament variety for under $100 to the towering vintage water pumps |
| 0:42.9 | accenting skylines next to barns or pastures and cornfields. |
| 0:47.4 | Fully restored or in beautiful decay, working or not, |
| 0:50.7 | these giant relics of Americana aren't just for decoration, and the West couldn't |
| 0:57.4 | have been one without them. |
| 1:00.1 | Out of the mid-1850, salesman John Burnham and machinist Daniel Halliday came up with the basic |
| 1:05.2 | design that we would recognize today with the Holiday Windmill Company. |
| 1:08.8 | It was relatively lightweight, nimble. It could swivel |
| 1:12.3 | so it was always facing the wind and angle its blades to adjust for speed to avoid damage and strong |
| 1:18.5 | winds automatically. Families and farms were able to pump water and store it in tanks |
| 1:27.0 | any time the wind was blowing. |
| 1:28.3 | Right around the turn of the century between the 1800s and the 1900s, there was over 600 windmill companies in the United States. |
| 1:35.3 | Tanya Meadow is with the American Windmill Museum in Lubbock, Texas. |
| 1:39.3 | The American Windmill Museum was started in 1993 by a lady who was a teacher at Texas Tech University |
| 1:45.0 | and Mr. Coy Harris, who is still our executive director. This building houses over |
... |
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