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The first windmills that were used in Holland for water draining are cited in written documents during 1414. Windmills intended for graining, have existed there two hundred years before that. Find out about the history of this. The oldest identified documents that mentions a windmill are the rights given to the city’s bourgeois, in 1274. The feudal superior could provide the right of building a windmill, to constrain the workers to bring cereals to his windmill, and also to avoid the development or even the planting of trees close to the windmill for being sure the strongest wind.

In the following years, windmills extended over Holland. Old towers that have been used for keeping gun powder were converted into mills. But the real development of Dutch windmills occurs at the end of the XVI century and the beginning of the next one. The windmills started to be used a lot more to make all sorts of manufactures. They were built from heavy wood, brought in ships from heavily forested lands from across the Baltic Sea.

The cheapest energy source for the Dutchmen was the force of the wind. Bigger and more powerful windmills could drain excessive amounts of water. That was extremely important as the land of Holland was constantly in the chance of being drowned by water. Since its territory was below the sea level, several great cities like Amsterdam and Haarlem were threaten to be flooded. To illustrate of the power of the mills, in just one year, the Beemster Lake was emptied by 26 windmills.

Around the year 1850, about 9000 windmills were functional in Holland, perhaps the best number that ever existed there. Subsequently, their number began to decrease. At the end of the XIX century there were only 2500 windmills left.

In 1920, an initiative for creating an association to protect the windmills was starting to take shape. This association was born in 1923, in Amsterdam. As an outcome of a petition the Dutch society of windmills wrote, in 1924 a letter to the minister of Education, Arts and Science that emphasized the significance of conserving these monuments. Same letters were submitted in 1930 and in 1939.

By the first of January 1961, an agreement has become successful and according to it, anyone who maintained an operational windmill received a subvention from the state. Usually, a windmill owned by an old person, who can’t keep it in working environments, is taken by the authorities and transformed into a historic monument. Usually, it shelters a museum or it becomes a center of receptions put-together in the respect of foreign visitors.

Holland greatly owes its existence to the windmills, because, with their aid, water was kept from flooding the terrain and can now hold a growing population.