starters it's ten ten o'clock on the dot so we try to be prompt with these welcome my name is matt helmets and i'm the development director here at wynn violent so this is our second year of doing coffee klatches which is kind of a way for us to continue having the island open during the during the off season when most of us are not here it's a pretty lonely lonely time anywhere from october through march when we start getting staff back in the gardens so we're just talking we're happy to see the frostbite happy there's no snow yet  and focus on topics they have to do with when the island or they have to do with holland culture or dutch culture we kind of try to be the epicenter of dutch culture here in holland in west michigan so today we're going to talk about a danish windmill this story really came about many of you seen elisa crawford our miller she wrote a book about our mill but then she also touched on some other mills in the united states this she just had a quick blurb in there and i happened to be at a conference about a month ago in illinois  several people who work at or run windmills around the united states and not only windmills and some water mill people they're like sawmills and one of the people i met was named lisa riggs and she's from iowa and she's actually the head of this danish windmill and the more she talked about it the more i kept saying us to us to the we do the same thing is the story was eerily parallel so it's really kind of interesting as we walk through it we'll see the parallels with this one as well as some of the differences and the difference is i think the danes have a little bit on us they're a little bit smarter than the dutch at some points i will talk about but there mills also but new or so so these are the two males we're going to talk about is does one hour we'll hear from the netherlands and then the windmill a lot of it was wrong because there was multiple women in the netherlands called this one so they would give them all different names but there was at one time about seven thousand mills in the netherlands so you can imagine a lot of them had the same names so there they didn't have as much of a problem they kind of just named  what town it was in so going forward we there's a lot of confusion and actually lisa in iowa says she gets us probably more than we do so do you all know the difference between denmark and the netherlands there is a difference one is danish and one is dutch the funny thing is i actually ran into this with my in laws there from my wife is from indiana and when i said i was dutch by heritage they said oh from denmark and i said no dutch just from the netherlands and they said well women were danes from and i said well they're from denmark and then the whole deutsch people are german so it confuses everything so again their militia from denmark armel is from the netherlands if you funny things that i found out actually the two countries are about the same size but the netherlands has about three times as many inhabitants it's very tightly packed they also there's about three times as many dutch americans as there are danish americans and most of us know the dutch americans we're kind of here we're in iowa there's still some in new york and new jersey out in california the danish are kind of spread all over there's actually a danish festival here in michigan zaman or that is greenville here they have those good they come evel skivers the like famous actually one of the islands out here and it means basically sealand in both languages so kind of interesting the two countries that have parallel and a lot of people who are not danes are dutch don't know the difference between the two especially americans we have a we have a high time with overseas geography i think a lot of times so interesting story about how the mills work work got here again where we will go over the whole story of just want today but i know this one was from the southern part of the netherlands a little town called vingle only about twenty four hundred people actually the town officially does not exist anymore not like it got wiped off the map but in the netherlands they have the practice of merging municipalities they used to have about three thousand cities and towns and townships now they only have about seven hundred because the government comes in and just says you guys are now one town because you're too small to have one governments would be almost like if the government came in and combined holland zealand holland township one township and just put them all in one municipality so iowa their militias it's kind of in the southwestern part of iowa they call it the danish villages area there are several villages they call it the america's largest danish rural community that there's probably more danes in new york city but they're the biggest rural community of danes so it's a tiny little town six hundred people there were settled about fifty years after holland was settled by reform folks they had a lot of danes move over there they started college you know same sort of story the whole grouping of people protestants came over to the small town  denmark so the mills there mill they know exactly what his bill is about an eight hundred forty seven and it stayed in one place the whole time that's the confusing thing with this one our mill is that it actually moved around a couple times and had parts and pieces place so there was never the mill that it was you know in one place the whole time so there is actually got moved over to the united states in one thousand nine hundred five and we'll talk about that story a little bit more as ours came by a decade earlier they got charged about ten times as much as we did and we did a story that a guy who actually bought the mill said he could have saved money but he was really under a pinch so he had to spend he had to get that mill there's a little bit shorter again we did put ours though up on a brick foundation to get it up into the wind so the mills are probably about the same size just that ours is on that brick brick span in world war two both the mills have an interesting story arc both were used as lookouts during the war there's actually was started on fire so they had a lot of fire damage they had  replaced after world war two ours has brought holes in it and we still show that story out there interestingly ours was the last mill that was allowed to leave the netherlands the dutch government said no more there was a last minute to leave denmark again people don't want and don't want to buying these things up a lot of the mills at that time all around europe really indicate which if you think about it we're talking you know two decades after world war two they had some they were trying to rebuild industry and homes at that time still rather than you know work on some of these other forty seven it's a similar type of mail it's a grain grinding mill they had a guy in the corner i was his name so they may have all these names we always joke about dutch people how your dutch address book has you know you might as well have one chapter for the vans and count most of us were born there but he went back and visited denmark and he saw all these when mills in disrepair and he thought our little danish community in iowa should get one of these mills so he came back to iowa and you know over coffee told his friends about this and the iowa corn they had a better elk corn club and they were trying to do things for the community they agreed with them and then one of the a dane had actually visited his family and corn you know kind of came the opposite way across the ocean and so they back and they said find this a mill we'd love to have a mill and they said when he came back his family actually thought he was drunk getting off the plane because the first thing he started babbling on about was i need to find a windmill to buy and they know they must over serve them a little bit on the plane ride because he's talking crazy so they thought he was drunk but he actually started looking and he found this little mail in the town called norris need which he didn't live there but was a mill is kind of in disrepair this is this is an  earlier shot of it and he walked up to the door knocked on the people's door who lived on this farm and said hi i'd like to buy your windmill the wife kind of slammed the door in his face because her husband has taken a nap and she thought again this guy is a crazy person  but eventually he got talking to him and they actually the couple who had this on their property were originally had thought about redoing the mill and having as a tourist attraction but they thought logically they thought it through their  back here and they thought we don't really want to have a tourist attraction and have thousands of people wandering through this thing fifty feet from our house it's kind of going to be a pain in the rear so they weren't really keen on it and they knew that the danish government as well wanted to have this is a tourist attraction so they actually wanted to get it off their property and they started talking to harvey and said to harry and said sure we'll sell it to you but he started driving up the price and he knew that they wanted a windmill and knew that the danish government again like the dutch government didn't want too many mills moved so he negotiated with them and actually at the last minute the town found out what he was doing and wanted to buy it from him kind of like in the netherlands our story goes that when they were buying our mail it kind of sat right on the border of three minutes a pallet and none of them wanted to pay for it but none of them wanted to lose it and we bought it and kind of we didn't sneak it out or anything they knew it was going on but no one was very happy about it that we bought the mill it from under their nose same story in denmark they were starting to realise that these things are a piece of cultural heritage so the islands were got the last one now so they actually brought the mill the mill cost them eleven thousand dollars and again harry said to the island's later i would have i would have got you a better price but i was kind of under the gun in this town is going to outbid me so he would have got them a better price but it took it cost him fourteen thousand dollars to dismantle this and eight thousand dollars to ship it over here so it's quite an expensive proposition and the amazing thing is again the island sent him over to find a m he bought it sight unseen he didn't tell the iowans how much he bought it for so his first information back to iowa was i need a check for thirty thousand dollars so he would have kind of been in a position the island would have said well that's way too much money he was committed to buying a windmill site unseen so it took about a month to take down in denmark and again it was in pretty bad repair but the danes kind of laughed they voice there's that phrase something's rotten in denmark where they joked with the mill they said everything's rotten in denmark with this mill because they thought the guys were taken apart oh my gosh someone's buying this thing there's no way they can be able to put it back together it's falling apart so they shipped it interesting story when they when they sent the check over the central banker who got it actually saw what it was for and ripped it up he didn't believe it was a real a real check so that i was actually to send back a second check because he didn't believe what they were doing and then they started taking this thing apart and shipped it shipped it to united states  customs in new york city the customs officials of course being government officials immediately contacted islands and said hey you need to pay us thousands of dollars for a customs they were trying to say that this was a piece of you know cultural heritage it wasn't like they were importing something to so eventually they settled on three thousand dollars they eventually got their money back because they fought the government about it then they had a problem that the beams were too long they were sixty six feet long and the trucking company said we can't get sixty six what beams not using it was kind of in disrepair still after the war at this point has been working since they've got it but it actually has broken down right now so that's a good question i'll kind of tell you about a piano they've kind of yeah that they have they have run into the same problems we have that we'll talk about that it's a working piece of machinery and pieces get broken and it's expensive to fix especially when you're in a country where you don't have no rights wandering all over the place like the netherlands or denmark so they moved hundred seventy five early one nine hundred seventy six the iowans there they're known for being thrifty like the dutch it's funny when she tells a story she tells the story about danish thrift so the trucks arrived in elkhorn iowa and they were going to leave  overnight and they said well it's only one hundred dollars a day to have it sit on the trucks and you know this is a big deal in elkhorn it's a town of five hundred people so the townspeople kind of had gathered around to see what was going on and they said well we're not going to pay you one hundred dollars extra so they literally unloaded the trucks that night to save the hundred dollars fee that they would have had to have the haulers there another day so these four guys are going to find them and read their names too because there's a bunch of sons here try if i can find them  so you can tell a whole community of sense if you go one more here so there mel they had to completely rebuild it this is actually the mill getting taken down over in denmark and this is the mill going back up in the united states so again they had to pour a concrete foundation but nowhere near the brick foundation like we have ours is three stories tall there is maybe a story and then they started putting up scaffolding but literally this is four guys who are in charge they're all in the construction industry but literally had to start thinking how do we build this thing we have we have no plans we have a model and we have some instructions again and everything they sent was in metric and so they had to translate all the metric equations to our american feet and inches so a lot of the tools they had t improvise so they built scaffolding and the saving grace at this time was actually this is a newspaper story just like this one is one came over it was a nationwide story of you know these hollanders are bringing this dutch windmill over same thing with the danes and danish guy in new york heard about it and his family had actually built when mills in denmark so he had his own time traveled out to iowa and offered to help them build this and he actually got i'm going to actually make it so it looked like an actual windmill so it did get rebuilt the hardest part they said and again it's amazing to think how these were built again this was built eight hundred forty seven so you think they don't have large construction cranes and eight hundred forty seven so they have we'll talk about what this is that the called the fan tail it weighs about ten tons and they have they built the base of the mill here in the main tower structure and then they had to put a lot of the heavier pieces up there so they to bring construction crane and also this was the point where they were scared if you drop that things you might as well just knock down the rest of when melancholia good so they had to bring these construction cranes in to put the fantail in place then to put the cap in place then they had to in the front part the blades actually come up this way kind of on this little knot cheer the blades go through there so they kind of all balance each other because again we'll talk about how it's a little bit different than are women so they finished it off they wanted to have it done for the bicentennial nine hundred seventy six  about the difference as you probably noticed it just looks a little different than our mail one of the big bangs how many of you have seen at least up there when she has to turn the mail into the wind our mail it's a huge pain in the rear of the cap stand we all behind she has to climb on that thing and pulled around to make sure the mills turn into the wind again because the actual cap of the mill is not really attached it can rotate so if you have strong enough wind and the blades are on the wrong side that cap could be pulled off the top of the mill so we have to make sure the always facing into the wind well the english actually had windmills and they kind of thought about this and it's really a pain to have to monitor the window all the time so they came up with this idea of a fantail so what this is it's behind the blades and what happens is that when the wind comes it catches that fantail and that those fans on here that look almost like a farm windmill those will turn as long as it's facing into the wind or it's facing you know cock eyed to the wind and that then drives a gear into inside the cap of the windmill that turns the cap and so it will stop once it's completely faced into the wind so it actually moves itself it's again wind powered it moves itself into the wind all the time so it's actually kind of an energy device so you don't have to sit out there you know have to drag the cap like elisa does into the mill that's why you don't see a capstone wheel or anything down here that fantail does all the work for you so you see here's up this will be what all the fans connect and here you see the large here that's connected up inside the cap to actually turn that mill so it actually would save a lot of time and it's quite a difference maker so that actually that technology came from england then it kind of made its way into scandinavia and germany and it did make its way to the netherlands but i asked lisa said so why don't any of the dutch mills have this and she said well some do very few but she said the dutch were a little bit more conservative and they didn't like these some of the new ideas even if they made sense  and it be once you had your mill i'm imagine a retrofit would probably be very expensive too so a lot of the mills in england have this a lot of the mills in the in denmark and germany have this but not a lot of dutch males so the other sets it off and you notice the blades a little bit different than ours so our blades are forty foot long blades then it has woods coming out from the side a sail stock and then we pull a sail over that so that's how our blades catch the wind because obviously a big pole  on the air is not going to catch any wind well again that's another one if you've ever seen elise i have to put the sails out she has to climb the blades pole canvas over almost like setting sails on a ship it's quite an enterprise for her to do and then you have to do all four blades to get to bring the blade down one by one and set all those sales takes quite a bit of time so again the english came up with this and the design made it to denmark you see they have a lot of slats there there's actually they're actually seven feet long and they go down all the blades and what happens is you can see they're all connected you see a bar here there's actually a pole in the windmill they can pole and over slats will open and you go to catch the wind and they push it back up and the slats close so right when the window is like this the wind can just go right through those sales or when they open the sales the shutters actually they call them the shutters will actually be opened and you'll have a basically a complete rectangle here to catch the wind so again a heck of a lot easier than what alisa has to do with sales but again this technology came along after our mill was was built and that's another thing you see every once in a while in the netherlands actually one of the guys at this conference worked at a mill in the northern part of the netherlands and they had a system like this on a small mill but again if you have your mill built like ours probably a retrofit would be very expensive to do you'd have to basically replace all your blades so it just looks a little bit different i think it looks kind of neat actually when you see it but just a difference from the from a dutch mills  so they were able actually to rebuild their mill they had it done in early one nine hundred seventy seven and yes it was working they said the story kind of apocryphal story maybe is that other than all danish lady bear when they were just had gotten already and she caught the first workers so it was actually a working windmill kind of interesting to the stones are actually stones about the same place we are you see there gallery so it's a little bit lower but it's a beautiful mill in iowa give you a few more facts on if i can find them here grants mostly cornmeal all told it cost about one hundred thousand dollars to bring this mill to buy it bring it over and to completely rebuild it even though actually most of the labor was done by volunteers so they did build a little gift shop next door i don't know you can kind of see on the picture on the left behind there where they sell they call it the world's largest america's largest danish gift shop because it has the most danish items available like we have you know the  like that they have the store here so it's funny because lisa the woman i met in the illinois she actually started in one nine hundred seventy seven the year after this mill came about and she still works there thirty nine years later she's still the manager so that's where she was just a wealth of information and help with this but it's actually been named i was top attraction two years in a row you know i wouldn't have that much stuff out there now so they do have the dutch with the premier window and power of though they have three full time employees ten part time employees but you asked about you know the mill working and i'll give you a couple facts here and in one nine hundred ninety five they had to they basically had a beam give way that went right through the mill here and it started sagging which meant the blades then got closer and closer to the mill tower actually and they had to shut it down and replace that blade that cost sixty five thousand dollars to replace they had right now they're raising two hundred thousand dollars  timbers for the blades the repairing a break we'll the fantail need some work and there sat course to actually bring grain of salt right now they're actually not producing grain but they have until fairly recently the last couple years so going to similar stories are wind mill we've we ve ry recently gone through that we had a raise a lot of money to do a lot of work in our mill records of million dollars so again this is actually run a little bit differently based they incorporated a milling corp they call it she said if they were to do it today do a little bit differently but they have this cooperate and it's made up of volunteers who are basically run this like a business that it's it's always she said you know ben ok and made money and they also have some other things nearby that people come and visit the top left is  the danish american it's a national danish museum there they have on the top right here is called the viking ham it's supposed to look like a viking house back from about your nine hundred year a thousand they have what's called the grandmother's house and they have a big long confusing name for a danish but i can't say i'm there we can speak a little dutch and danish is not my game but it's a grandmother's house kind of an early settlers house that people can come visit like maybe like the kapan house here and then they have some things like a bust of hans christian andersen and then a mermaid statue like they have in copenhagen so it's kind of neat it's really parallels with a lot of the stuff we do here at the danish mill very interesting story that again i think parallels ours and we are kind of his nice conference to go to especially to meet her just to kind of say how do you do things there how do we do things here who visits you who visits us how do you repair the thing when it breaks down they actually work with a mill right out of north carolina who works more on american style mills and they've they've gotten all that work done from him and we usually use a dutch mill wright who comes here about once a year now so it's very interesting a couple more facts i want to give you that they have core stories how many  ever seen these this time of year that are kind of ubiquitous aren't a lot of people put like their sewing stuff in here i know keep around home because we're cheap and it's nice tim well these are called red dansk butter cookies and you see him all the time this time of year me give you all history of this so robots cookies actually started they say they started in one thousand nine hundred sixty six that's when the company who makes the actual royal danske started but their history actually goes back a ways earlier than that and i looked it up online because we said kind of clued me into this she said that several years ago one of the best guess they've ever gotten as a gentleman brought in an old old book and was a huge book and he said i want to give this to you it's actually the mill book from your mill and it listed all of the people who had come to buy products you know back decades decades decades and what they found is one of the names they found in there was kill sense and let me read you this little history of the danish use the same type of ingredients as now serve one hundred twenty cookies or countries around the world it's very famous cokie but the people who actually started this company they had their mill ground in the danish when well that's in iowa now and so they tell that as a as a neat story to connect people and people say oh cool danish one million but it will connect people may say hey if you eat these cookies because the people who originally started this company got all their green ground right in that mill that's now in southwestern iowa so it's kind of a cool story so actually today when we go next door and have coffee we don't have windmill cookies today for one event when rhode island we have royal danske danish butter cookies so hopefully we'll survive we don't have one for sale here but i can tell you i went and got some so you can eat some over next door they're on sale this week a dollar general for three dollars a ten because that's what i got and i saw it on sale so again we have some for you to try with the magic most people have tried those so any questions as we talk about this danish windmill  and i was in iowa it's run by this mill corporation and again it was kind of one man's dream who brought it over the community it's a very small community said that's a great idea but they started the mill corporation so it's actually a volunteer board basically that runs this windmill that has the city does not own it you know the state does not know it no and it's a separate kind of like how we have here we have a couple different dutch attractions but they're not owned they actually the viking him is on their property but the other three are kind of separate from them denmark because they they had less windmills in the netherlands did but again after world war two a lot of the mills had started to decay they were you know they were most of them weren't used anymore because they had more modern milling techniques so a lot of times yeah they were sitting in the farmer's back forty just kind of falling apart like our old barns do here and some people see that as a parallel there are some people even around west michigan that want to save some of the old barns here because otherwise people say you know we don't use them just let him fall apart that's what they're windmills were doing and again at that time they were still rebuilding from the war in the fifty's in the sixty's and americans started seeing this cultural side of things and say hey bring them over to our danish or dutch community and the government just had started getting involved so now there are laws in both denmark and the netherlands that you cannot move windmills anywhere in america or anywhere else and we've taken care of ours who yeah we always tell we i was told a story a little bit too not to not to rag on him but there was one mill that left the netherlands just before ours and it moved to a know if you can tour and there's open year round so and right now it's not running i thought i'm not sure how many floors you can go up in their mail and they have like this viking ham and they have their store and then in their city they have some more of these other lot of the time some people would say would say you know we're going to just destroy this building the open air museum and say no no work will pay it will come in take it and refurbish it and have it in their museum space to so people can come to or rather than have it just torn down and again that's we hear that locally i know counsel who talks about the old dutch barns that are called who are a little bit unique barns that were built in this area by the dutch settlers and now a lot of times guys just knock them down and build a nice pad barn to put all their toys in but there's not very many of those dutch barn around so i know there are some folks who are saying we need to preserve some of that stuff there one hundred fifty years old to keep from to keep from our heritage alive a bit of heritage she didn't have well and he was and there is a movie they have one movie that's pretty old from the seventies if you go on you tube or if you go on the website is this danish mail dot com they have to move these one was made probably in the ninety's or early two thousand and one was made in the seventy's where they have hair is a little grainy and kind of hard to hear so i didn't play it for you today but they do have to make said it was one of the neat stories they had and i forget where i read it but they said one of the the gentleman when they brought the mail over and again there unloading off the trucks they said one  elderly danish gentleman had one of the undone mark moved here and they said when they were moving the mill off the trucks what he did is he had never been back to denmark ever in his life but they said he kind of took the side of the blade ran his finger down it got some of the salt from the ocean and licked the salt and they said he saw the tearing up because he said that was all you know he could once again taste the danish salt so you have these people and again when we moved ours over there was very few dutch immigrants left when they moved there is over there were operates a little bit different than ours and they can get good ideas from them and we can get good ideas from from the each other what's that a lisa and there lisa and lisa is actually not she's kind of in my role so she's more of the the office personnel say and elise is actually a male so i think they have met they've they've they've had some communication zones that she's not a miller and they don't they have a staff three full timers and about ten part timers and they have several of them who can run the mill she has yet i don't think they have any female nurse and elise is also certified they don't have any sort of five millers like we not she's about three to three years away there's a time period ten years from when she becomes a certified miller to where she can try for her masters so she's not a master more yet but i know that's something she wants to do yeah yeah yeah and i did i did hear i think she said that this last year they have another female miller now in the netherlands so don't quote me on that but i think she said that because she just got back from meeting this fall so and  serious it comes from the mill guild that she's a member of so she's a member of the yeah the yep she's the only american member in that whole guild so when she when she has to go to meetings she has to fly  all kind of tutor who are not as professionally run as we are here like the mill that we visited in fulton unfortunately they had they were milling one day and had an accident their mill no one got injured but a lot of the cobs on one of their main spur wheels all broke off and they didn't notice it right away to shut it down so their mail is now out of operation until they have a very expensive fix and again it's in a small town in illinois i don't know where or how they're going to get the money i really hope they do know it can be you can run into mistakes and it's easy if you make a mistake up there to cause a lot of expensive damage  see the winds are coming out of the north she'll turn the mill into the north and she that's where she's always paying attention to the weather so it's actually one of things we're looking at this winter is getting a weather station out there so she can have all help and the f b i her phone all the time checking that so well all i have a couple more slum in the netherlands and moved over and it's about it's the subtitle is an immigrant journey from holland to holland and he's got an interesting story he's he's actually brothers with jacob de boer who runs de boer bakery he's an interesting guy he was actually a soccer coach for a number of years and he's been back and forth to the netherlands several times so it's an interesting story about his take on the differences between holland here and holland where they're quite different if you've been there so i'll be talking with him in december can we do have signed up for a community garden as well we're going to having that again next year we had twenty one plots this year i think we're in a forty something next year it was a great hit so we have signed up so over there again thank you for coming we do have our friends memberships that are available if you'd like to sign up and we do have good coffee from j p's this year don't need our coffee so if you happen to stop in j p say thank you and definitely enjoy your coffee this morning so i'll be we'll both be over there laurie and i so head on over grab some coffee grab some butter cookies so