Clearly, this is not the place in which to describe the almost infinite variety in structure and operation of windmills in different places and at succeeding stages in the perfection of the mill as a machine. A list of a few easily procured books appears on [page 32] for those who wish to pursue the subject further. This little pamphlet must be limited to a description of the reconstructed mill in Williamsburg and how it operates.
First, a word needs to be said about the men behind the mill, Edward P. Hamilton, former director of historic Fort Ticonderoga, New York, and Rex Wailes, then of London, who were Colonial Williamsburg’s consultants in the careful process of design and construction. Mr. Wailes, a world authority on mills and milling machinery, furnished information on all phases of the use of windmills in England, and in particular provided measured drawings of a seventeenth-century mill still standing at Bourn in Cambridgeshire. Mr. Hamilton carried on from there. By vocation an investment counselor (retired) and by avocation a collector of watch and clock mechanisms, an authority on windmills in America, and a skilled model builder, he transformed the drawings into miniature reality, creating a perfect working model in which every part performs the function assigned to its larger counterpart in the mill itself.
William Robertson, who sold to John Holloway in 1723 four lots near the Palace “whereon the said William Robertson’s wind mill stands,” was not a miller. Neither was Holloway. The records left by both men provide no clue as to the exact appearance of the mill in question. In fact, the deed to the land itself did not give any more precise location for the mill.
Reconstruction of the mill, therefore, had to depend on answers to two questions: Just where did Robertson’s windmill originally stand? and What kind of a mill was it?
Robertson’s Windmill, a faithfully authenticated post mill, stands in Williamsburg today on a spot near the Governor’s Palace where its predecessor is believed to have stood about 1720.
By eliminating every other possibility, the site of the lots was established with certainty at the corner of North England and Scotland streets. By elimination again, the spot where the mill must have stood was placed at or near the present site—simply because other buildings were known to occupy various other locations in the tract. Thorough archeological excavation of the whole area, however, disclosed no corroborative evidence to show the precise location of the mill.
At the same time, the absence of such evidence was itself almost conclusive evidence that the mill was a post mill such as were common in tidewater Virginia at that time. A tower mill, which was the second variety often built hereabouts in colonial days, would have had foundations in the ground. Traces of these would have been revealed by digging at the site. Since none of the foundations excavated in the four lots was suitable to the underpinning of a tower mill—ergo the mill must have been supported above ground on a wooden post.
And so it was rebuilt: a small post mill, simple in design and operation, with but a single pair of millstones. The tail pole, extending to the rear, ends in a wagon-wheel support that eases the miller’s task of turning the mill by hand to face the wind. Other millers sometimes had shoulder yokes attached to the tail pole, or pulled it around with the help of a small winch anchored to one of a circle of posts.
The stairway from the ground up to the body of the mill, called the “ladder,” is hinged at the upper end so that when the mill is to be turned, a lever raises the foot of the ladder off the ground. When the mill has been positioned to face the wind, the end of the ladder is lowered to the ground again where it helps hold the mill against further turning.