East Hampton windmill gets second wind

As East Hampton's historic Hook Windmill seemingly levitated above the village green, Tony Winters squeezed into a cramped space beneath the 1806 landmark and penciled a pattern on a massive timber.

After checking his lines with a T-square, Winters and boss Richard Baxter went to work, using a power saw for a rough cut and then, for the delicate touches, carefully chipping out the wood with an old-fashioned mallet and chisel.

It was one step in trying to extend the life of the four-story structure by at least a few more centuries.

Windmill preservation is taken seriously on the East End, home to 11 centuries-old wind-powered grist mills built in what began as English settlements. They are the largest surviving regional group of windmills in the nation, said Robert Hefner, a windmill expert and preservation consultant overseeing the project.

Despite the weak economy, East Hampton village, which owns three mills, didn't balk at allocating $200,000 to restore the Hook Windmill, which in its day represented state-of-the-art wooden technology. The project includes a new timber foundation, replacement of rotted ends of support posts - work that Winters and Baxter began several weeks ago - and adding new cedar shingles.

"How could we not spend the money?" asked village administrator Larry Cantwell. "It's clearly historically significant, and it's an icon for the village," emblazoned on both the village and town seals.

"The windmills symbolize our sense of history and that this was a New England farming community," Hefner said. "And they embody the age of wooden technology."

On Long Island, Hefner said, windmills were situated primarily on the East End because land to the west had streams and harbors to provide "water power, which was cheaper, more efficient and more predictable" for grinding grains into flour.

Long Islanders can thank 19th-century artists who immortalized them in bucolic landscape paintings and prominent families like the Gardiners who were passionate about history for the high survival rate of the windmills.

"The East End, particularly the South Fork, was discovered as a summer resort, and artists came out here and loved to paint windmills, so they were valuable as part of the picturesque landscape," Hefner said.

Only a few windmills were lost. One in Orient was moved off the Island in 1898 while the Amagansett mill burned in 1924.

By the end of the year, Cantwell said, the Hook Windmill will be able to operate as it did two centuries ago. As was the case before it deteriorated, "a couple times a year we will put the sails on and run the mill, although we don't necessarily grind anything."

The first hint the mill was in trouble surfaced about five years ago when its cap would no longer turn to face the sails into the wind. Confirmation that something was amiss came last fall when the village public works superintendent noticed the ends of floorboards on the ground level were sticking up three or four inches.

A village carpenter removed the flooring and discovered one side of the wood foundation and ends of corner posts that rested on the frame had been so riddled by powder post beetles that poking a finger into the remaining wood caused it to crumble into dust. The deterioration had allowed the structure to settle five inches on the east side.

Richard Ward Baxter Restorations of Amagansett, which had worked on all three village-owned mills, got the restoration contract. Its first task was building a new foundation from 13-by-12-inch rot-resistant heartwood from Suriname.

It was installed after the village hired Davis Construction House & Building Movers of Westhampton Beach to raise the structure. The company used computerized hydraulic jacks to lift the mill on a grid of steel beams and place it on wooden cribbing.

"We were nervous about whether it could be leveled without damaging something," Hefner said. "But within an hour he had leveled the mill and raised it two feet without a creak."

That allowed Baxter and Winters to begin cutting off the rotted bottoms of the corner posts to "scarf," or cut, in aged sections of replacement wood up to 14 feet long. "Then hopefully," Baxter said, "the mill will last another 300 years."