Before You Install A Windmill, Learn About Their History
The first windmills that were used in Holland for water draining are mentioned in written documents in the year 1414. Windmills used for the processing of grain have existed there for 200 years before that. The oldest mention of a windmill can be found in some documents from the year 1274, where they were a priveledge offered to city elite. 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. Older towers that once were used to house gun powder were transformed 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. The windmills started to be used more and more to make all sorts of manufactures. 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. Bigger and stronger windmills could drain large quantities of water. That was incredibly necessary as the land of Holland was constantly in the danger of being drowned by water. As its territory was under the sea level, many great cities like Amsterdam and Haarlem were threaten to be flooded. As an example of the power of the mills, in just one year, the Beemster Lake was emptied by 26 windmills.
At or around the year 1850, there were approximately 9000 active windmills in Holland, which is probably the greatest number that had ever existed there. After that date, their number started 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. A lot of times if an older person owns a windmill and cannot maintain it in working condiion it is taken over and converted to a historic monument by authorities. 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.