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October 3, 2009

Art to catch the wind

Restored windmills harken to bygone era

By Brian Ojanpa

MANKATO — City folks’ idea of lawn art is cute critter statues and a whirligig or two.

These farm folks’ idea of it is a circa 1930 windmill, resurrected and restored, and towering over their farmyard.

Ron and Elaine Marzinske’s 45-foot metallic piece of nostalgia grandly reposes on their lawn, an iconic nod to the way farm life used to be.

Good Thunder farmer Doug Hager rebuilt and erected the windmill for the couple, who give him two thumbs up.

“We waited a long time to get it done, but he does excellent work. He’s a perfectionist,” Ron Marzinske said.

Hager said he’s had a lifelong interest in windmills, which once were rife in rural areas.

“They were a big part of southern Minnesota. There were literally hundreds of windmill companies in the 1920s and 1930s. Every farm had them,” Hager said.

Marzinske’s came from the family farm he grew up on near Good Thunder.

Back in the day, windmills were used to pump water. Their demise in the 1940s coincided with the onset of rural power cooperatives, which replaced windpower with electricity and relegated thousands of windmills to scrap yards and the back forty.

When the Marzinskes moved seven years ago to a farm five miles southeast of Mankato, the windmill came with them. Hager, a hobbyist who has rebuilt and re-erected 15 windmills for area people, only recently got around to the Marzinskes’.

Hager said the windmills he’s restored are in working order but virtually all are ornamental. The only one being used for its original water-pumping purpose belongs to a man with a large flock of sheep in a distant pasture.

Rather than running electricity all the way out there, Hager said the farmer opted to draw water for his animals the old-fashioned way.

Hager said rebuilding vintage windmills is time-consuming because he must fabricate archaic parts from scratch.

The Marzinskes positioned their windmill just so — they wanted to see all four legs when they gazed out from their home — and Elaine has designs on festooning it with strings of lights and an underplanting of flowers next spring.

She said she even might climb to its top someday, as people did decades ago to check on harvest progress and scan the countryside.

Mostly, though, it’s there for sentimental reasons.

“It’s something old, like the two old people that live here,” she joked.

Her husband amended that:

“Don’t say old; say ‘mature.’”

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