When I have time, I toss things onto the green tech map and timeline, both of which you can access in the left bar. They are both pretty incomplete, but contain a lot of information that I’ve gathered over the months I’ve been researching the book.

One great find that I added to the map today is the American Wind Power Center and Museum in Lubbock, Texas, which was established in 1998. Though now maintained and funded by a whole crew of people, much of the credit for the creation of this unique historical treasure is due to Billie Wolfe, a home economics professor at Texas Tech, who just loved windmills. The museum’s site describes her dedication:

In the mid-sixties, Billie Wolfe, a faculty member of Texas Tech’s College of Home Economics, taught courses in Housing Design for Family Living. Supporting documents for these classes included photographs of farm and ranch structures. Those photographs invariably had in the background a windmill… During the following 30 years, Ms. Wolfe traveled throughout the country, searching for windmills, interviewing farmers and ranchers who owned them and frequently securing a mill and shipping it to Lubbock. In 1992, Ms. Wolfe learned from Alvin Davis, Director of the Ranching Heritage Center, of an unusual collection of restored windmills in Nebraska that was for sale.

She negotiated with the owner of the windmills and (with the help of Coy Harris and some funding) acquired the collection intact. Harris and his team keep hundreds of windmills in good working condition, so that visitors can understand how these relics actually worked. The image at the top — snatched via Google Street View — shows their handiwork.