The first windmills that were used in Holland for water draining are cited in written documents in 1414. Windmills used for graining, have been around there two centuries before that. Read more about the history of this. The oldest identified documents that mentions a windmill are the rights given to the city’s bourgeois, in 1274. The feudal superior could give the right of building a windmill, to constrain the workers to move cereals to his windmill, and also to avoid the development or even the planting of trees close to the windmill for being sure the strongest wind.
In the following years, windmills extended over Holland. Useless towers that once were employed for keeping gun powder were converted into mills. Yet the real development of Dutch windmills happens at the end of the XVI century and the start of the next one. The windmills started to be used a lot more to make all kinds of manufactures. They were built from heavy wood, brought in ships from substantially forested lands from across the Baltic Sea.
The cheapest source of energy for the Dutchmen was the force of the wind. Bigger and stronger windmills could drain large quantities of water. That was extremely required as the land of Holland was frequently in the danger of being drowned by water. Because its territory was under the sea level, lots of great cities like Amsterdam and Haarlem were threaten to be flooded. To illustrate of the power of the mills, within one year, the Beemster Lake was emptied by 26 windmills.
Throughout the year 1850, about 9000 windmills were functional in Holland, perhaps the best number that ever existed there. After that date, their number began to decrease. By the end of the XIX century there were only 2500 windmills that remained.
In 1920, an idea for making an association to protect the windmills was starting to take shape. This association was launched in 1923, in Amsterdam. As result of a petition the Dutch society of windmills had written, in 1924 a letter to the minister of Education, Arts and Science which emphasized the significance of conserving these monuments. Similar letters were submitted in 1930 and in 1939.
By the first of January 1961, an agreement has become successful and according to it, any person who maintained an operational windmill received a subvention from the state. Usually, 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. Typically, it shelters a museum or it becomes a center of receptions organized in the respect of foreign guests.
Holland greatly owes its existence to the windmills, since, with their help, water was kept from flooding the land and can now hold a growing population.
Posted under Wind Power Solutions At Home
This post was written by assistant on February 9, 2011


