From: "P. J. Alling"
According to the local records it was never a windmill. If it were it would have been a grinding mill in the location it was in. Even then most people knew better than to grind flour near an open flame, so a fireplace makes it being a mill a bit unlikely. It's sort of overbuilt compared to the other windmills in the area as well. Arnold's father still may have built it though.
Looked it up again, and apparently it was Arnold's great-grandfather, colonial governor of Rhode Island who built it. It's mentioned in his 1677 will as "my stone built windmill".
Doesn't have to have been a grist mill; and if it was, the grinding wouldn't have been done on that upper floor where the fireplace is located.
A contemporary windmill (1686) was built at Fort Senneville in Quebec. It doubled as a watch-tower and fortress, with thick stone walls and loop-holes for muskets.
In the late 1600s when the tower was presumably built, there was still considerable hostility between colonists and native Americans, including King Philip's War of 1675 - 1676. A windmill doubling as a fortified watch tower is not a radical idea.
Interesting historical note: The windmill & fortress at Fort Senneville was destroyed in 1776 by General Benedict Arnold.
Another possibility is the tower was used as a sawmill, or perhaps even as a pump mill.
... or it might have been built by Chinese explorers of the Song Dynasty sometime between 960 and 1279 as a navigation tower to establish longitude for junks outbound to China.
-- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
