Perkins windmills: water for the Plains, by the thousand

1883 – 1925

A product whose market was a region: The Perkins windmill's outward record is a volume record with a geography attached. The company's sales line, in Gas Engine Magazine's company history, runs from 1,500 windmills in 1883 to 5,000 a year in 1899 — and the St. Joseph County Public Library's account, carried on the city's 2014 marker, states where those mills went: the solid-wheel Perkins mills "pumped water across the Great Plains farm country the railroads were then settling." A windmill is not sold at the factory gate to a neighbor; five thousand a year is a carload trade, shipped by rail to the farm-machinery dealers of Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas — the record reached names the region and the settlement it served, and not the individual states or dealers, and this entry prints the region at that strength and no finer. The trade journal's superlative travels with the volume figure: Gas Engine Magazine pairs the 5,000-a-year line with the judgment that Perkins had become the world's largest manufacturer of windmills. The superlative is the magazine's, printed here as its claim; the volume is the company's sales record as the trade history carries it. The end of the outward line is the Businesses section's — receivership in 1917, the removal to South Bend dated 1920 in the trade history and 1925 in the local account, production ending about 1925 as rural electrification reached the farms the windmills had served — and it belongs in this section for one reason: the windmill trade died of its market disappearing, not of a rival's machine. The Plains got wires, and the Mishawaka mills stopped going west.

Sources:

1. This build's Businesses section, Perkins Wind Mill entry — sales of 1,500 windmills in 1883 and 5,000 a year in 1899, with Gas Engine Magazine's "world's largest manufacturer of windmills" judgment printed there as the magazine's; the St. Joseph County Public Library account on the city's 2014 marker (the mills "pumped water across the Great Plains farm country the railroads were then settling"; manufactured until after the First World War); receivership 1917; the removal to South Bend dated 1920 (trade history) and 1925 (local account), both printed; production ending about 1925.