Probably the best historical examples are the Dutch land reclamation windmills and the irrigation windmills on Crete.
Mechanical windmills are still in production and thousands are installed every year.
The amazing thing is that the design of these windmills has not changed for over a hundred years. The reason is that they were so well designed in the first place. A new competing technology, wind-electric water pumping, was developed by Bergey WindPower and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture in the 1980's. These systems use a wind turbine, generating electricity, to power standard electric submersible water pumps. Windmills work very well at low wind speeds, so they tend to give more reliable water supply than wind-electric systems.