Windmills on Roanoke Island

In 1862, Charles Johnson of the Hawkins Zouaves remarked on the many windmills on Roanoke Island and the Outer Banks, where windmills were common in the 19th century on Ocracoke, Hatteras, Bodie Island, and on Roanoke Island in Wanchese, Manteo, and the North End. By mid-century, about 150 mills dotted North Carolina’s eastern seaboard, using wind rather than water to grind meal and perform other work. These North Carolina mills were post mills, rectangular frame sheds built atop a single huge post so the structure could revolve, with a long tail post reaching to a wheel on the ground about seventy feet away to turn the building into the prevailing winds. Their four frame blades were covered with canvas sails that could be furled for different wind speeds, and the rotating fan powered a simple system of wooden gears that turned one millstone against another to grind grain, often dried corn kernels, into fine meal. Most windmills along the Outer Banks were used to grind grain, especially corn, though in other eastern North Carolina counties they also pumped water, sawed timber, and helped manufacture salt by pumping seawater into shallow evaporating reservoirs. The windmill at Island Farm is representative of one that stood on the farm from the mid-1800s until the early 20th century; after extensive research by National Park Service employee Lynanne Wescott, craftsmen reconstructed this operational structure in the 1970s using traditional building techniques and hand-carved interior details, and like earlier mills built to be easily moved, it was moved from Nags Head to the farm in 2010. An 1851 map shows the site of the original farm windmill near the present-day Elizabethan Gardens.

North Carolina · United States