De Zwaan Windmill

About this property

De Zwaan is an authentic Dutch windmill in the city of Holland, Michigan. The windmill's name is Dutch for The Swan. It is the oldest authentic, working Dutch windmill in the United States. De Zwaan is located in Windmill Island municipal park. When Holland, Michigan residents Willard Wichers and Carter Brown were looking for a way to pay homage to the city's Dutch heritage, they set up a project to bring a Dutch windmill over to the United States. However, many of these listed structures had suffered serious damage in World War II. As a result, the Dutch government had imposed a ban on the sale of windmills outside the Netherlands. Wichers and his group were able to obtain an exemption by selecting a severely-damaged mill known as De Zwaan, that had been in operation in Vinkel (the Netherlands) since being moved there in 1884 by a family named Van Schayk. De Zwaan was at the center of a controversy, with three local agencies unable to determine the future of the damaged windmill. The Dutch government decided to sell it to Wichers for $2800, making De Zwaan the last windmill to leave the Netherlands. Windmill authorities in the Netherlands provided the City of Holland with the history of De Zwaan, noting that it had been built in Krommenie, Netherlands, in 1761 as a grain mill set on a raised base in order to enhance wind capture. In October, 1964, De Zwaan arrived aboard the Prins Willem van Oranje. It was unloaded at the Muskegon harbor and transported by truck to Windmill Island in Holland. It took approximately six months to reconstruct the mill. The city erected a raised base rather than the mound of earth it had been set on in Vinkel, so as to restore it to its original design when it stood in Krommenie. Once erected, the City of Holland celebrated it as having been over 200 years old at the time. In April 1965, the 125-foot (38 m) windmill was formally declared open on Windmill Island, a 36-acre (150,000 m2) site reclaimed from a swamp on the eastern end of Lake Macatawa. It is open from late April through early October. When winds are favorable (15 to 20 mph (7 to 9 m/s) from the west), De Zwaan's 80-foot (24 m) diameter blades are usually in motion. In 2015, the City of Holland celebrated the 50th anniversary of De Zwaan being in Holland. In preparation for the celebrations, De Zwaan's resident Miller and historian, Alisa Crawford, started compiling the only definitive book ever written about De Zwaan. She holds a master's degree in museum studies and is the only Dutch certified miller in the United States, an accreditation she earned after years of independent study while working for the City of Holland at De Zwaan. While researching data about De Zwaan's original construction, Crawford learned that De Zwaan in Krommenie had been taken down in 1887, which was three years after De Zwaan had been relocated to Vinkel. She realized that there had, in fact, been at least two windmills in the Netherlands named De Zwaan.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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