American Wind Power Center
Near Lubbock, Texas
On twenty-eight acres of city park land east of downtown Lubbock stands one of the largest collections of antique windmills anywhere. The American Wind Power Center began with Billie Wolfe, a Texas Tech faculty member who spent three decades in the nineteen sixties through nineteen eighties photographing and documenting windmills across the country before they disappeared. Her documentation effort led to the museum, which was established in nineteen ninety-three around a core collection of forty-eight rare windmills transported from Nebraska.
Today more than a hundred and sixty windmills stand on the grounds, spanning wooden water pumpers from the eighteen eighties to early electric turbines, representing many American windmill makers. A model train layout inside the building shows the historic relationship between the railroads and the windmills that gave their water tanks a reliable supply across the treeless Plains.
