They’re Whirling in Wind Again : Old Windmills Are Put Back to Work

Mark Allinson studied the finely detailed drawing in the “Windmiller’s Gazette” carefully, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

Inside the recent quarterly newsletter for windmill enthusiasts was a reproduction of a 1901 advertisement depicting the Samson, a windmill that now sits partly assembled in Allinson’s back yard in Fallbrook.

“This is what puts it all together,” he said. “The last clue to the puzzle.”

Allinson and his wife, Linda, are in the business of finding and restoring old windmills, some dating to the late 1800s. Several of the antique wind machines restored by the couple are back at work, pumping water from wells.

The drawing showed the Samson at an angle Mark hadn’t seen before, giving him the information he needed to piece the poorly documented machine back together.

It took Mark one year to rebuild his first windmill--a 1925 Aermotor found in a broken-down barn in Valley Center. Now it pumps water from a 300-foot-deep well on the Allinsons’ ranch, at a rate of about 7 gallons of a minute, depending on how fast the wind is blowing.

The water is stored in a large pond, and is used to irrigate four pastures, on which the Allinson’s horse, lambs and cows graze. The Allinsons also raise pigs, chickens and turkeys, all without having to buy water from the city.

“The beauty of windmills is addictive,” said Mark, who embarked on his unusual hobby in 1989 and started selling the restored machines a year later.

“Nobody that you talk to knows about them. It’s a forgotten art. There are very few books and drawings on windmills. You just have to start putting them together and not give up.”

Mark, a retired contractor who runs an equipment rental business, said he didn’t want to waste what he learned working on that first windmill. He was also looking for an interesting side-business that would keep him challenged and at home with his wife and two children.

While looking for more windmills, he noticed a pole sticking out of the middle of a lake in Vista. Suspecting it was the remnants of an old windmill tower, he took a closer look and ended up dragging another Aermotor windmill head from the bottom of the lake.

The Allinsons placed an ad in a Fallbrook paper to see if people would be interested in purchasing restored windmills, and were surprised to receive seven phone calls the next morning.

Mark and a friend from the construction business scoured Texas for eight days, looking for telltale signs of windmills: a wooden tower standing in the middle of a field, an electrical line running down the side of a hill, even a pole in a valley.

“Trying to find out who owns them takes a lot of time,” he said, recalling finding a windmill head lying hidden in a field of grass, and no home in sight.

He brought back six windmills, and plenty of spare parts.

The business is mostly a hobby, the Allinsons say, as the price they charge, about $5,000 doesn’t cover the time spent restoring them.

By comparison, Dempster Industries, a Nebraska-based company that has been making windmills for 112 years, sells a 12-foot-diameter windmill with tower for about $6,800, said Dean Kilgore, water systems sales manager at Dempster. He said the company’s business in California is going well.

Mark said that, although newer machines are available, he believes the old ones are built to last.

“Nowadays, the American way is, if there’s a two-year warranty, they are made to last two years,” he said, explaining that, of the hundreds of bolts he has removed from the machines, only six have broken.

All that is required to drill a well on private property is a $180 permit from the county health department, which makes sure that the well is properly sealed so surface contaminants cannot seep into the ground-water supply, said Gary Stephany, the county’s director of environmental health services. A $2,500 bond must also be carried either by the landowner or the drilling company in case underground aquifers are damaged.

John Peterson, hydro-geologist for the county Department of Planning and Land Use, said that, in some areas such as Palomar, Julian and Boulevard, ground water is the only source of water available.

Most of the several thousands of wells in San Diego County, 95% of which are on single-family residences, use electric pumps to bring water to the surface, Peterson said. Windmills are less powerful and less reliable than electric pumps.

Meanwhile in Fallbrook, where Metropolitan Water District water is available, Mark spends 10-hour days working at “something I just love doing. I work on one until I’m baffled, stop it, and work on another one, and then I’ll think of something and go back,” he said.

“They’re so simple that they’re confusing. You can spend days putting it together, and get the blades on backwards, then hook it up and laugh at yourself when it doesn’t work.”

One of the windmills he brought back is the Wonder, which revolutionized the windmill industry in 1912 by encasing the gearings in an oil-filled box. Previous models used an “open-gear” design, with a reservoir which had to be refilled with oil each week.

Two of the Allinsons’ windmills are at a Fallbrook feed store. One turns a waterwheel, another of Mark’s experiments, which aerates the water in a decorative pond.

He has also built a playhouse into the tower of another windmill he installed in Rancho Santa Fe. And he is working on a 1895 Flint & Walling windmill, its “open-gears” replaced with a modern design, for another Rancho Santa Fe home.

An antique shop in Bonsall has ordered a windmill that will help advertise their store, without having to set up a modern billboard.

Mark, 44, and Linda, 38, moved to Fallbrook from Downey in 1976 to find a healthy environment in which to raise their children, Lillie Rose, 8, and Ashley 9. Mark is an ex-policeman and speedboat racer, and Linda a hairstylist. Together, they run a neighborhood business renting out equipment such as tractors, cement mixers and ladders.

Early in their relationship, the Allinsons traveled the back roads of America searching for antiques, and took hundreds of pictures of country homes, each invariably with a windmill and water tower.

“We love the sound and the look of them,” Linda said. “It was a common interest of Mark and I from Day One.”