Batavia's Windmill Works

On 29 August 1854 a Connecticut machinist named Daniel Halladay patented a windmill that looked after itself. The Halladay Standard turned to face a shifting wind without help and held a steady speed in a gale by changing the pitch of its sails through a counterweighted governor, so it could be left standing on a prairie farm unattended. It is generally called the first commercially successful self governing windmill made in America. John Burnham organised the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Company at Chicago in March 1857 to sell the mills, and in 1863 the firm bought out the Halladay Wind Mill Company and moved the machinery to Batavia. By 1881 it was being called the largest works of its kind in the world. Competitors followed it to the same riverbank. The Challenge Company was founded in 1867 and was turning out two thousand windmills a year alongside its other farm machinery, and six manufacturers worked in the town in all, Snow and Danforth among them. Appleton Manufacturing was the late arrival, a Wisconsin implement maker that took up windmills in the 1890s and came to Batavia after its plant burned in November 1900. The town picked up the nickname Windmill Capital of the World, and windmills came out of it from 1863 until about 1951. What they sold was not scenery. A self governing mill put water on a farm, or on a railroad water stop, where no stream ran, which is most of the ground west of the Mississippi. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated the Batavia windmills a historic mechanical engineering landmark in 2013, and the restored mills stand along the Riverwalk beside the Government Center, which is itself the old Appleton factory.