GRANDPA'S WINDMILL

 Finally they were able to move to the 160 acre farm and lived there for several years. This is the farm with the windmill!

Before that big windmill was erected, an old fashioned wood tower mill was used to pump water to the cattle. No one now knows when the new mill was erected – perhaps in the 1920’s. This was a huge improvement over the wooden one because it had a “brake” and could be started and stopped to fill the water tank.

As was the custom for farmers in that era, the time for renters to move was every March 1^st. So it was about 1930 when my parents moved to Grandfather’s 240 acre farm where they lived until my father’s death. He died in 1968 and my mother stayed on the farm that winter – a horribly cold and snowy winter – until she moved to a small house in Lennox the next year.

In 1946 Eddie and I were married and moved onto Grandfather’s farm, the same farm where my parents had lived when I was a small child. We used the windmill until electricity came to the farm in 1950; rural water came a few years later.

This is our farm as it was in the 1950's