Abandoned windmill in South Dakota


Hawkeye Valley Mill, Wessington Springs South Dakota
Date added: August 20, 2022 Categories: South Dakota Mill
North and west elevations and setting, camera facing southeast (2011)

The Hawkeye Valley Mill was built in 1894 by Elwood C. Lyle. It is located south of Wessington Springs, in the Hawkeye Valley of the Wessington Hills, just west of Firesteel Creek. The mill is a rare surviving example of small feed mills that used power windmills to perform tasks like shelling corn, grinding feed, and operating machines like saws for the owner's and neighbors' farming operations. It was built by an early township settler in a period of economic downturn and drought. The symbolic power of tall windmills on the prairie landscape, combined with the need to recognize the different scales of operations that supported the agricultural history of South Dakota, makes this mill able to tell a significant story.

The Hawkeye Valley is the central valley of the Wessington Hills settled by several migrants from Iowa, the name possibly originated because of the "hawk's eye" view from the hills. In the 1930s, there were about twenty farm families in Hawkeye Valley, two one-room grade schools, a cemetery, and a church.

This power mill was part of a larger landscape of agricultural processing. There were several small grain or feed mills on farms in the county during the 1880s and 1890s, and the Jerauld County Milling Company was established in Wessington Springs in 1909. Lyle's smaller wind-powered mill and others like it could be used by their owner, family, and neighbors to conveniently and economically perform necessary tasks for their farms, a significant piece of the landscape of agriculture and industry on the Great Plains. Many farmers enclosed the base of their windmills, or installed a windmill atop a barn structure, to house mechanical operations like feed mills. One account, from a dairy operation north of the Hawkeye Valley in Beadle County, describes enclosing and roofing the base of a Challenge wind mill for a spring house where pumped water would keep milk cool. Lyle and neighboring farmers used the Hawkeye Valley Mill to shell corn, grind feed, sharpen tools, and pump water. The original wheel, depicted in a painting informed by oral histories, most closely resembled a Single Header design produced from 1879 through the 1890s by the Challenge Wind Mill and Feed Mill Company headquartered in Batavia, Illinois. The Challenge Single Header was a thirteen- to twenty-foot section-wheel wooden mill with two side wheels, a weight instead of a vane or rudder, and vertical shafts that could run shellers, grinders, saws, churns, as well as pump water. It was a less expensive alternative to Challenge's showpiece Double Header, and it was most commonly used in the Midwest and on the Great Plains. These "power mills" were less common than windmills used only to pump water on farmsteads, and their survival is even rarer.

The wheel was replaced in the 1930s and was only used to pump water. The current wheel remnant is likely a Monitor W Series design made by the Baker Manufacturing Co. of Evansville, Wisconsin from 1933 into the 1960s, characteristic for its "Iron Vault" gear box case, the closeness of the wheel to the head, and the slight backwards tilt of the wheel. The W Series wheels were marketed to modernize older mills. According to local knowledge, the Hawkeye Valley Mill stopped operating altogether in the 1950s.

Elwood C. Lyle was born in June 1853 to Joseph M. and Olive Lyle, in Butler Township, Butler County, lowa. His parents were enumerated as farmers in 1856 and 1870, and they operated a small hotel in 1860. In 1880, he was farming in Prairie City, Bates County, Missouri with two younger siblings. Rejoining other family members, he moved to South Dakota between 1882 and 1884. On April 24, 1889, Elwood took out a patent claim for a homestead on the southeast quarter of Section 23, Township 106N, and Range 65W. His father homesteaded in Section 15, his brother-in-law Samuel S. Moore homesteaded directly to the north in Sections 23 and 24 in 1882, and his brother Herman homesteaded two quarters nearby in Sections 22 and 27. By 1909, Elwood had additionally acquired the southeastern quarter of Section 22 and the western half of Section 25. His farm in the Hawkeye Valley was worked by at least two other families, John Rea and Jane Arnott in the early 1900s, and Bill and Elsie Houwman. Not a particularly well-documented historical figure, a short biographical entry on Elwood C. Lyle noted that "he was a builder in the early years and a successful farmer." From other records, we can know that his other ventures included building a horse racing track and serving as an assistant cashier officer for the Wessington Springs State Bank from 1918 to January 1920. Elwood passed away in Wessington Springs, on March 15, 1928 of stomach cancer. At the time of his death, he had some debts and owned several pieces of property worth about $29,100: five in rural Jerauld County, one lot in the town of Wessington Springs, as well as two rural properties in central SD in Sully and Stanley Counties and a property in Morton County, North Dakota. Further, as an officer of the Wessington Springs State Bank, Elwood was liable for over $28,000 in "excessive" mortgages held when the bank failed in 1924. Under litigation with the Superintendent of Banks of South Dakota at the time of his death in 1928, his brother Herman, as executor of Elwood's estate, could not resolve the probate until 1947. During that period, Herman recorded spending around twenty dollars on repairs and labor for the windmill and pump. The southeast quarter of Section 23 of Anina Township was willed to Herman who passed it to his son Milo in 1947. In 1960, the property was sold to Donald B. Thompson, and in 1984, it was passed to Paul C. Bunn before being turned over to Aetna Life Insurance in 1989. In 1991, Lawrence LeRoy Grieve bought the quarter section and he passed it to his son, the current owner, David in 2005.

Jerauld County: Anina Township

Anina Township (T106N, R65W) was surveyed in 1872 but was not settled until 1882. The nearest town of Wessington Springs was established in 1880 by the Reverend A.B. Smart with a small group of Methodist settlers, and a plat was filed on May 26, 1882. Jerauld County was organized by Dakota's territorial legislature in 1883. Natural springs on the eastern side of the Wessington Hills and woodlands in the hill valleys supported the new town and agricultural development in the area. The population grew most in the first years of "boom" settlement in the 1880s, had a small drop during the recession and drought of 1890-95, nearly doubled during the 1900s, and then began a trend of decline in the 1920s.

he Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway extended through the county and the first train reached Wessington Springs on September 20, 1903. For most of its existence, Jerauld County has been around 90% agricultural; in 1935, around 60% of the county was under cultivation while another 34% was pasture or wild hay. In the late nineteenth century, farmers in the county raised hogs and cattle, and they grew wheat and, to a lesser extent, corn, oats, and other grains; by the 1930s, corn had overtaken wheat. At the time that this feed mill was built, Jerauld County, like the rest of the region, was suffering from a combination of a financial panic in 1893 that lasted through 1896, and a severe drought in 1894. County historian, N.J. Dunham vividly described the 1893 panic, saying that "a cyclone of adversity had swept the county and left ruin and despair everywhere" when prices crashed for grain and cattle, but "like wayfarers caught in a storm, the people adjusted themselves to the situation as best they could and waited for the tempest to pass." During the regional drought in 1894, Dunham described a fair crop in places and a resilient population, crediting the quality of Dakota soils, market prices that held steady from the year before, some agricultural diversification, and the farmers who stayed. The following winter of 1895-96 proceeded to be a heavy one, but afterwards conditions were generally good until the recession following World War I. Heavy mortgages given during that recession and bad conditions in the 1920s led to an agricultural recession that preceded the 1929 economic crisis and 1930s dust storms. In February and March of 1924, both of the banks failed in Wessington Springs; the first was Farmers State Bank and the second was the Wessington Springs State Bank. That, in combination with bad storms, deaths, and accidents in the community, caused one local historian to title it "The Tragic Year of 1924." Like elsewhere on the plains, county residents remembered bad times during the 1930s that included dust storms that left high drifts along fence lines.

The most prominent geographic feature in the area is the Wessington Hills, which extend across the county as well as south into Brule County and north into Hand County. They make up a chain with Ree Heights, the Coteau de Missouri, and the Bijou Hills on the western edge of the James River (formerly Dakota) Valley. Crow Creek drains west to the Missouri River and Firesteel Creek drains east to the James River, the soil is mostly loam with clay subsoil, natural tree groves grow in the valleys, and an artesian basin lies under most of the county. The Wessington Hills were said, in the early days, to have concealed "hide-out bands of horse rustlers and other renegades, the timber-lined draws affording excellent concealment for their movements, and the summits enabling them to discern approaching parties." The prairie was well suited to use wind-power successfully, and the Wessington Hills have been known for the strength of the wind there for many years. In the early 2000s, the hill summits were chosen for the location of the South Dakota Prairie Winds Project that erected wind turbines for energy-production.

Windmills

In the built landscape of the Great Plains, structures like church steeples, grain elevators, and windmills that rise vertically in juxtaposition to the horizon line have become iconoclastic in the culture and aesthetic of the plains. The height of windmill use on the plains lasted from the 1880s to the 1920s. Windmills represent the long history of industry and engineering used to channel the power of nature into power over which humans could exert control, and they have come to symbolize the perseverance of small farmers who made a living on the plains in the days before expansive power infrastructure. The multivalent need for and symbolism of water has also made pump windmills important in the culture of those living on more arid lands.

Though windmills have an ancient history internationally, during the 1850s, the American popular and scientific press actively promoted the development of wind-power as a cheaper alternative to steam, animal, or human power; over fifty U.S. patents were filed for windmills or improvements on windmills in that decade. The first commercially successful self-governing American windmill was invented in 1854 by New England mechanic, Daniel Halladay, and engineer, John Burnham. Before that time, the large windmills inspired by European traditions had to be monitored and manually adjusted as the winds changed. Self-governing mechanism made windmills a viable tool on the expanding American agricultural landscape for commercial and community projects as well as individual farms.

Most early farm windmills were made entirely of wood except for select working parts that were made of cast iron, wrought iron, or steel. A major style of windmill in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, produced first by Halladay's company, was the sectional-wheel windmill on which sections of blades could pivot as needed to catch the wind or fold to allow strong, damaging winds to pass through the center. In the 1870s, vaneless section-wheel windmills became more common and are often associated with the Dempster Company. The other windmill type that originated in the nineteenth century was a solid-wheel pattern that angled itself to adjust to the wind instead of folding; these Eclipse mills were first produced by L.H. Wheeler & Son and its successors, although most companies eventually produced some variety of solid-wheel design. Some farmers built their own windmills from lumber and materials they had available on the farm. Through the 1890s until World War I, there was a gradual increase in production of all-metal windmills. This occurred earlier than, but not as quickly as the wood-to-metal transition for other agricultural implements. Wood windmills continued to be used because they were thought to be stronger and they were easier for owners to repair on their own, but the combination of the production and marketing capacity of the Aermotor Company and a self-oiling design by the Elgin Wind Power and Pump Company made all-metal windmills increasingly popular. Also, adoption of fuel motor pumps which used gasoline led to an overall decrease of windmill production beginning around 1914, speeded along by general agricultural decline in the 1920s and rural electrification projects during the 1930s.

The primary need for windmills on the plains was pumping water, but, there was a notable demand for power mills that could produce mechanical power for grinding grain and other tasks. Pumping mills used "a pump rod with an up and down motion" and power mills gave a rotary motion to a vertical shaft, and this, in turn, to a horizontal shaft which [drove] the grinder or other machine." The most common were 12- or 14-foot size wheels used to grind grain for livestock feed, but also were used for "sawing wood, operating churns, cutting fodder, shelling corn, turning grindstones, and operating other small machines." Enclosing or having a structure at the base of a windmill tower could serve to create work space for operations powered by the mill. The Hawkeye Valley Mill has a full-height tower enclosed with a frame barn structure, but it was also common to attach a windmill head to the top of an existing barn. Some historic photographs of power mills in Kansas and Nebraska show their integration with mill buildings of medium to large size; many smaller mills were likely never photographed.