DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'm gonna do my best to do it justice. Now, picture this. The year is 1887, and the Yellowhouse Division of the XIT Ranch — all three million and fifty thousand acres of it — needs water.
Out here on the Texas plains, that's not a small problem. So they did what any sensible outfit with an impossibly big spread would do. They thought impossibly big.
They built a windmill. Not just any windmill, mind you, but a hundred and thirty-two feet of windmill, set down in a canyon southwest of where you're sittin' right now. A canyon.
Think about that for a second. They dropped this towering thing down into a canyon, because it had to be tall enough to catch the breezes that skimmed along up top, tall enough to reach up out of that cut in the earth and drag the wind down to do its work pumping water. A hundred and thirty-two feet.
That was, by all accounts, the tallest windmill in the world. The world. Out here in Lamb County, Texas, they built the tallest windmill on the face of the earth.
Now, you might think a structure that audacious would stand forever, just out of sheer stubbornness. And it did stand — for decades it stood. But in 1926, the winds that had spent all those years being put to work finally had enough.
They came back with a vengeance and toppled it. The very thing it was built to harness is what brought it down. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I suspect.
Today what you're looking at is a replica, erected on May 27, 1969, so that folks passing through would know — something extraordinary once reached up out of that canyon and touched the sky.
What the marker says
Yellowhouse Division of 3,050,000-acre XIT Ranch built (1887) a 132-foot windmill southwest of here. Set in a canyon, it had to be tall to catch breezes and pump water. It was known as the world's tallest windmill until it was toppled by winds in 1926. This replica was erected May 27, 1969. (1970)