As the sun rose Monday morning, the streets were quiet, save for crickets and birds. Then, a rumble.
Down North Henry Street, an entourage of utility cars and police escorting a 25-foot windmill house peeked out from above the hill, quickly proceeding down Duke of Gloucester Street and settling at the windmill’s new home at the corner of Francis and Botetourt streets.
A small crowd of bikers, joggers and Colonial Williamsburg staff gathered at the corner of Duke of Gloucester and North Henry streets at 6 a.m., when the windmill began its journey to its new home. An hour later, the entourage rounded the corner and onlookers followed it down the cobble streets of Colonial Williamsburg.
“It’s just another day in Williamsburg!” one of the crowd members said.
The windmill’s move has been in the works since the spring, but was delayed due to a structural issue in the windmill that was found when it was taken apart. With the issue repaired, Colonial Williamsburg staff and contractors B.E. Hassett Millwrights and Prillaman Crane and Rigging could finally move the windmill house, the last piece to be added to the new site. They filed permits, moved electrical lines, ensured tree branches wouldn’t be in the way and collaborated with city organizations.
The windmill is a 1957 replica of a 1636 Bourn windmill in Cambridgeshire, England, and has known many homes during its life at Colonial Williamsburg. It once was behind the Peyton Randolph house and then was moved in 2010 to the Great Hopes Plantation, behind the Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Center.
In its new location in the heart of Colonial Williamsburg, staff hopes the windmill will help teach visitors about 18th-century farming. The Colonial Williamsburg gardens will eventually join the windmill near its new location and farmlands will be developed on-site. There is not a set date for the windmill to be fully open to the public.
“We’re creating an immersive experience for the visitor, and we’re making the windmill available to visitors as well. So the access to the mill site, the farming site, will be much, much easier for our visitors and this important story can then be told to them, and then they’ll have a better understanding of kind of how agriculture worked in the 18th century,” said Matthew Webster, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s executive director of architectural preservation.
Windmills like the one placed on the site were found in colonial Virginia — although a windmill was not located directly on the site, a 1782 “Frenchman’s Map” shows a windmill located nearby, along present-day South Henry Street.
The windmill, called a “post” windmill, is operated in several pieces: the sails are mounted on the front of the windmill house, which is in turn mounted on a central base or “king post.” A wheeled pole, called a tailpole boom, is mounted on the back of the structure so a miller can rotate the entire structure, sails and house, to capture the wind.
“What it really is is a big machine. It’s lots of moving parts,” Webster said.
The 55-foot long sails and 18-foot tall post were already delivered to the site — the mill house was the last piece needed on the site to complete the full windmill. All the pieces will be assembled by the end of the week, Webster said.
Just three hours after the 28,000-lb. windmill house began traveling to its new site aboard a flatbed trailer, it was lifted into the sky and settled on the king post, or the base structure of the windmill, completing its journey.
Dragonflies, drones and several more onlookers who had gathered in the morning hovered by the house, watching its progress — some from the very beginning.
Leslie Shotwell remembered when the windmill was at its original site and when it moved in 2010. She works at the Williamsburg Inn and had an early shift, so she decided to see if she could catch the move and went to the corner of Merchants Square at 6:15, she said.
“These things don’t happen every day in Williamsburg,” Shotwell said.
Madison Peek, madison.peek@virginiamedia.com
