Westhampton Beach Windmill Moved To Great Lawn, Restoration To Begin Later This Year

Westhampton Beach Village officials were excited to see their vision of restoring and preserving the Governor John Adams Dix Windmill beginning to take shape last Thursday, July 7, as a procession of trucks carried the 150-year-old windmill — in four pieces — from its former home on Sunswyck Lane to the Great Lawn at the western end of Main Street.

“It was a nice convoy down Main Street,” said Deputy Mayor Ralph Urban, who has taken the lead on the preservation effort, along with Village Board member Brian Tymann and Mayor Maria Moore. “The move went very smoothly.”

The windmill was gifted to the village in June 2021 by Adam and Didi Hutt, the new owners of the property where the windmill stood, the one-time estate of 19th century New York Governor John Adams Dix, who built one of the first “resort-style” homes in the village in 1873, according to Larry Jones, a preservationist with Jack L. Jones, Building Conservation Ltd. of Westhampton Beach, who is helping guide village officials in the windmill’s preservation.

The Hutts demolished the home and are in the process of building a new estate on the parcel at the corner of Sunswyck and Beach lanes. But they were interested in seeing the historic windmill preserved and, through Jones, contacted Moore. The couple was very patient in allowing the village to come in and remove the windmill, even though it threatened to delay their building plans.

Urban said he was pleased this week that the village was able to get the structure moved in time.

“I was very apprehensive that we would get it done in time,” he said, “because of the timeframe of the new owners of the property building their new home. They and their contractors were very cooperative and helpful. It is nice to get it done. Now we move on to the next phase.”

The windmill was separated into four pieces to make the move on three separate trucks easier — and save the village a little money, too. If it had been left whole for the move, PSEG Long Island and other utilities would have had to be brought in to take down the power lines, at a significant cost and causing service disruptions to residents and businesses.

The procession, led by a truck with sirens flashing and including a large crane truck, made their way up Beach Lane to Main Street and then west to the Great Lawn as Village Police cordoned off the streets to traffic and the Department of Public Works removed signs and other obstructions during the move.

“We were happy as a clam about that,” Jones said. “It worked out beautifully. Anytime you move a building, there’s a million things that can go wrong. The move went very cleanly. It ended up being quite a parade.”

According to Moore, the cost to move the windmill totaled just under $49,000, and will be paid for entirely with funds raised via the Westhampton Beach Historical Society’s GoFundMe campaign and the Greater Westhampton Chamber of Commerce.

The pieces — sans siding, which was removed and discarded — were deposited in a corner of the Great Lawn, enclosed in a snow fence to keep them safe and will be shrink-wrapped in the coming days or weeks to protect them until the windmill can be reassembled later this year.

“I would anticipate that we’re going to go into the winter before any further work is done because of the long application process and getting things engineered and going out to bid,” Urban said. “All that’s going to take some time.”

There is still some discussion about exactly where on the lawn it will be erected, and that won’t be until a well can be dug. Unlike many windmills on Long Island that were used to mill grain, windmills in Westhampton Beach — there were close to 35 of them at one time, earning the village the moniker “Windmill Town” — were used to pump water. The plan is to restore the Dix Windmill to its original functionality as a water pump.

There were also a couple of surprises discovered in disassembling the windmill, Jones said.

It turns out that the third floor of the structure was heavily fortified with heavy timbers, meaning that it probably had a large wooden water tank built into it. Jones surmises that the fortification and weight of the tank helped keep the windmill standing, even in the face of big storms and hurricanes.

Jones said they haven’t determined yet whether to rebuild the tank, but he’s leaning that way. “When you pump water with these things, you need that water to go somewhere for storage,” he said. “That’s what this tank was for.

“We honestly think that part of the reason this windmill withstood all these hurricanes is that it had water holding the structure down,” he added. “It’s quite heavy.”

Another surprise was the lack of a stairway to the second floor — people originally either accessed it through a breezeway from the attached home or there was a hatch and people climbed up with a ladder. So Jones said they are trying to figure out how to add stairs and still have good space within the windmill.

“We want to have people climb up in it,” he said. “We want to have museum exhibits that relate to why did you have windmills out here and how they worked.”

Once restored to good working order, the windmill will have an educational component, serving as a type of museum for visitors demonstrating how the structures were used.

Officials are committed to not having the estimated $400,000 project be a burden to local taxpayers, funding the move and the upcoming restoration through a mixture of grants and private donations.

In addition to the donations, the village may utilize a $100,000 endowment left to the village, along with a $125,000 state grant secured by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., and possible grant money from the Southampton Town Community Preservation Fund, which can be utilized for historic preservation efforts.

The town landmarked the windmill earlier this year, allowing the CPF funds to come into play. Now that the windmill has been delivered to the Great Lawn, Moore said, ownership will be officially transferred to the village and the landmarking of the windmill by the town will become effective.

“This is the kind of project that I like,” Urban, a former teacher in Montauk, said. “I enjoy history — just the ingenuity of the people of the past. It’s simple. It’s not like a computer — I can understand how it works, and I like it.”

Tymann said this week that he was thrilled to see the project advancing.

“My impression of the windmill move is simply that when people work together, with no egos involved, big things can happen,” he said. “No arguing. Just people working together to accomplish a task.

“I can’t say I’m surprised that it came to fruition,” he added. “If I were surprised, it would mean that I doubted that it was possible. When tasked with the challenge, I remember saying, ‘Okay, we can do that.’ Even though many people around me thought I was delusional. I said that we’d have $10,000 in the first week. And we did. And look where we are now.”

Moore added that many people and organizations have worked tirelessly so far to make preserving the windmill a reality.

“It feels great to preserve a piece of the village’s history,” she said. “This first step in the process would not have happened without Adam and Didi Hutt, who donated the windmill to the village, Jack L. Jones our historic preservation consultant who worked tirelessly to make this day a reality, all those who generously donated to the Westhampton Beach Historical Society’s GoFundMe campaign organized by Eleanor Kobel and Brian Tymann, the Greater Westhampton Chamber of Commerce, the Reverend Jubinski and the wardens of St. Mark’s Church for agreeing to allow the placement on the Great Lawn, and the Town of Southampton for landmarking the windmill. With the support of the Southampton Town Board, the Community Preservation Fund and Assemblyman Thiele, the village will now begin the process of restoring the windmill to its original splendor.”