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Windmill, Cooper, and Rural Trades

Windmill

A useful man was Williamsburg's William Robertson. Appointed clerk of the colony's Council in 1698, a director of the fledgling capital in 1705, and a city alderman in 1722, he also operated a most serviceable windmill.

Reconstructed on its original site, Robertson's tall, lattice-vaned, linen-sailed machine today commands Colonial Williamsburg's Windmill, Cooper, and Rural Trades site. Near it, barrel makers and sawyers work, and farmers tend rows of 18th-century staple crops like corn, tobacco, and wheat.

Visitors see how a colonial barrel was made, wheat was ground, tobacco was packed, a shingle was split, and a board was sawed or riven.

The windmill was the domain of the miller and his assistant. Robertson's was a post mill, a design that appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages. Its superstructure balanced on a huge, single timber--or post--to be turned into the wind by a man at the tailpole.

When the breeze spun the windmill's blades, a shaft and gear arrangement turned a millstone to grind corn into meal or wheat into flour. A bolting or sifting apparatus on the first floor fed the product into bags.

Traditionally, the miller collected a toll of one-sixth the weight, but there was room to bargain. For whatever it may say about Robertson's profits, he sold his windmill and four city lots to Mayor John Holloway in 1723 for a modest £80.

In colonial Virginia the real money was in tobacco. Grown, cut, and dried, it was pried--or "prized"--a thousand pounds at a time into hogsheads 48 inches high and 30 inches in diameter to be shipped to markets in Europe. From planting to prizing, tobacco production is demonstrated here, as is the cooper's skill in making hogsheads.

Colonial coopers made wooden containers for everything from boots to brandy. Their best barrels, then and now, were fashioned on site from staves sawed, shaved, and planed from white oak.

Cedar as well as other woods served for shingles. Demonstrations of how logs were turned into building products is a specialty of the site, found just beyond the Peyton Randolph House.

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