History - Home Sweet Home Museum

The Windmills

For most of the last century, Americans have regarded windmills as a picturesque remnant of our agrarian beginnings, a pleasant, even romantic aspect of the landscape in certain areas of the eastern seaboard.

But in their earlier life they were hard working laborers in the community, applying man's ingenuity to tasks essential to survival: they ground grain, sawed wood and pumped water, and assumed all of which the wind could be applied to do the work of their designers.

Today in East Hampton, Hook Mill, Pantigo Mill and Gardiners Mill  still stand. They represent all the best their sponsors could afford, the best tools their community could provide for the job at hand. They represent some of the oldest and best examples of American craftsmanship in the Wooden Age. A windmill is an intensely practical - and usually very crowded piece of engineering and construction. Moving around inside of one is much like exploring the workings of a giant clock.

These mills can be read as testimonials of a native technology. Windmills attract us all because they are survivors of a remarkably different era.