We’re in the final stretch as snow blankets the roads leading to December. Such was the story of this year’s Julefest celebration which fizzled out almost as quickly as it began following the forecasted snowstorm. Many of Friday’s festivities were cut short, and a Snow Emergency shut down the rest of the weekend for Main St. businesses. Although the weekend was largely a disappointment for all involved, the mill faired okay. It wasn’t pretty, but we worked well with the traffic we got to finish out the month.

The end of the year is always a large gamble for the mill. We invest the bulk of any revenue we can generate during the travel season into inventory that we hope to sell during November and December, two months that can account for 30-40% of our annual revenue. As a result, snow and closures can hurt us significantly during this time of year, as we depend on events that simply cannot be rescheduled to ensure we make it to the end of the year.

And so we are hoping for the best as we turn our attention to Christkindlmarket Des Moines which will be held over two weekends this year for the first time. We will be there in our usual hut sponsored by the Rasmussen Group, and we’ve heard the Museum of Danish America will have volunteers at the festival as well. These next two weeks can make or break our year, and our staff will be out in the cold winds of Downtown Des Moines to make the most of this opportunity. We also wish to thank Nicole Butler and Jon Adams for volunteering to help with the festival this year.

Preparing for the festival is always a challenge. We have a 20' rental truck in the parking lot to help us move a large chunk of our gift shop to Des Moines so we can built out our space. I have no doubt we will completely fill it before we get there. It looks like we will be in for a cold first week with some potential for snow, so we are taking the precautions we can to ensure things don’t freeze which is always an issue for the 20+ cases of glogg we bring with us.

On the homefront, Phyllis, Joanne, and Joni will continue to run the store while we are gone. We’re sure many of our usual Julefest visitors will be making their annual pilgrimages to Elk Horn on either of these weekends. We hope you will find time to stop in and tour the mill or do a little holiday shopping with us.

Work on the preservation center is at a halt for the moment until we get through the holidays, but the building is at least sealed up for winter. We have electric, but are still waiting on heat and water. Water, of course, has been a sore topic around here the last few weeks, but at least the snow has made our parking lot no longer look like a stockyard with all of the digging in every direction. We do wish to thank Jacob Henry, Elk Horn’s new public works director, for his dedication to resolving our recent water issues as quickly as possible.

And finally, it is no secret that death has had an extended stay in our community recently. We wish to honor those who have passed in recent days, some of whom were vital parts of our organization in different ways: Annette Andersen, Lavon Andersen, Rosa Clemson, Verdell Hansen, Doris Jones, Bev Larsen, Howard Sorensen, and Eileen Sornson.

Keep your loved ones close this holiday season, and have a Merry Christmas from all of us at the Danish Windmill.

Colder temperatures are moving in quickly as our short stint with Fall quickly turns to Winter. We had another unusually busy month this October with plenty of travelers passing through.

As we prepare for the approaching holiday season, we have acquired more new items for the gift shop including the return of Danish paper mobiles, Livingly as well as an assortment of new gnomes. Our catalog is also finished and in the process of mailing out right now. A digital copy can be viewed at danishwindmill.org/catalog.

The windmill joined other local businesses at EEHK’s literacy night in Exira this month. Shaun hauled over an antique manual grinder and some copies of The Little Red Hen to teach kids about the hard labor required to turn wheat seeds into food. The kids enjoyed trying to grind some grain themselves and each left with a souvenir vile of flour ground in the windmill. They later told Shelli Nelson that grinding is hard work and they’re glad they don’t live in the “old days.”

The windmill also debuted its new LED lights this month. Tim Palmer volunteered to help Shaun get them installed, and we’re still exploring all of the different light patterns we can use. The best part about these lights is they are permanent, and allow us to continue to run the windmill through the Winter without having to wait to take them off.

Work on our new Education & Preservation Center is also progressing. Erik Andersen, Mike Howard, Sarah Sayres, and Gene ‘Beaner’ Thomsen have all volunteered their time to help get the siding installed and painted. We managed to get the exterior painted before the cold set in, and will hopefully have the battens installed fairly soon. We still have painting, flooring, and more to get the inside ready.

Until then we’ll be preparing for what we hope will be another festive and busy Julefest!

Summer has yet to stop at the windmill as September has been just as busy as August with travelers from all over. We hope the trend continues as we transition into Fall.

In the gift shop we’ve picked up a few new products for the Fall season. We now have Glacial Till hard cider in a number of delicious flavors, available by the can, a 6-pack mix of any or all flavors. We also picked up Mike & Jen’s Hot Cocoa featuring their regular cocoa mix or mocha latte. We have both single-serve packets or scoopable mix. We even added some special mugs for the season to go with them.

If you’ve noticed an uptick in our social media posts for the gift shop, it’s all thanks to Johanne Lyager who has been helping us out on Mondays. Every week she creates new posts for Facebook and Instagram, and we have added TikTok as well. We’re very thankful to have her with us.

Meanwhile across the street, work has begun to renovate the Old Danish Workshop. The siding was in desperate need of replacement, and we are also looking at upgrades to the building’s electrical and HVAC. New floors will be put in both rooms, and there is a lot of cleaning and painting to be done for the walls and ceiling. We want to thank our volunteers: Mike & Lou Howard, Mike & Lisa Riggs, and Gene “Beaner” Thomsen for helping out with the project so far. There is still a lot to do and we are still looking for help if others wish to volunteer. We are hoping to get the new siding on the building next week. We’ve already picked out the new colors for the exterior and our goal is to maintain the authentic Scandinavian look using historic colors and patterns.

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting an EEHK field trip with Mr. Baggett’s 11th grade English class, Mrs. Christensen’s Multi-Cultural Foods class, and Mr. Weis’s Principles of Engineering class. The group toured through the windmill with Shaun and got to a chance to learn more about the windmill and its significance from the inside. We hope to see more groups from EEHK this school year. Many of our readers may remember the days when it was customary for the community 3rd grade classes to make a trip up into the mill and learn about Elk Horn’s Danish past. We are hoping they may come back this year.

As we get ready for Fall, we do have one major obstacle out of the way. We will not have a container this year. Due to how late last year’s container arrived, we have quite a bit of merchandise from last year’s orders and not a lot of funds to spend for this year. While we are trying to get a couple of small orders through, most of the stuff we have for this coming season is already here and arrived before the tariff hikes.

Finally, we want to thank the Audubon Country Players for putting on a great show on the life of Hans Christian Andersen. The sets were beautifully done and the play had a large number of local performers including our leading volunteer, Annabelle Baggett. Mill staff journeyed to Audubon for the Saturday night showing. We sold some fairy tale books and made sure Annabelle had a flower arrangement waiting for her at closing. It was a great night and we wish to thank the showrunners again for including us.

The mill enjoyed another very busy month in August this year. Usually there is a noticeable drop in visitor traffic once the state fair kicks off, but even then people just kept coming in. We had over 1,800 signatures in our guestbook, mostly visitors from Iowa and Nebraska as expected.

Many of the big projects we discussed in our last issue are now complete with the exception of one. We are still working on getting the live stream up on YouTube to our liking. There have been some technological hiccups in the process, but it should not be much longer before we are finally live.

In the gift shop, we’re excited to announce the long-awaited return of our electrical aebleskiver pans, now back in stock. On another note, however, we won’t be bringing in a container from Denmark this year. Between last year’s late arrival and this year’s tariffs, we do not have the funds to place a shipment this year. But, we also have a good stock, so while we may run out of some things sooner than later, we’re confident we can move into the Christmas season with a plentiful inventory. We will just have to manage with what we can. And we have some other custom products in the pipeline as well that we hope to get by the start of the holiday season.

Julefest advertising forms have gone out as we gear up for another exciting festival that is just around the corner. We have printed new quarter sheets about the festival to hand out, and encourage local businesses to pick some up to help advertise the event. The Kringle Man is already distributing them at all of their travel shows.

Finally, we are excited to announce that we have received an HRDP grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa to be put towards a new set of millstones. The awarded funds are enough to cover the cost of ordering a new set of stones. This is important as it remains unclear how much longer the industry will continue given the lack of new craftsmen in the profession. Stone cutting of this kind is a dying trade, and it was critical to get a pair of stones ordered as soon as possible.

Møllebygger Petersen is in the process of ordering the new stones. Once received, they will continue to hold the stones at their facility in Denmark until we are ready to have them shipped here and installed. We still have a long way to go in fundraising for this project, but having the millstones secured is a major step forward. We hope to have more literature out on the project in the coming weeks as we advance into Phase II of our Back on the Grind campaign.

We’re also very excited to welcome EEHK’s Danish exchange student, Johanne Lyager to our team. Johanne will be volunteering her time with us on Mondays for at least part of the school year. She has indicated an interest in boosting our social media presence. We believe she will be a great asset for us and offer a fresh perspective.

We have quite a bit of news to share this month and only so much space, so bear with us as we run through some of the highlights.

First, the numbers are in from Phyllis Hoegh and we had 2,408 visitors sign our guestbook in July this year. The top states were some of the usuals, Iowa, Nebraska, California, Colorado, and Illinois. We had 115 foreign visitors including 84 from Denmark, rounded out by a veterans group from Copenhagen.

We’ve been in the middle of some capital projects this month. First, as we’re sure everyone is aware of by now, our southern cottonwood is now gone. We contracted Top Hand Tree Service to cut down the tree and trim some of the low-hanging branches on the western three that will remain standing. This decision was not made lightly. First and foremost, we do not build wind farms in forests because trees block wind. All of our cottonwoods have grown upwards of 25-30 feet since the windmill arrived in 1976 with the southern tree taller than the windmill. The windmill is designed to face the wind, and we need to ensure it does so as much as possible, especially during storms. It was recommended by our Danish colleagues that this tree be removed for this reason. Additionally, there were growing concerns about the welfare of our Vikinghjem. Cottonwoods are notorious for dropping branches, due in part to their rapid rate of growth that produces heavy branches, but weak wood. For the security of the Vikinghjem and the safety of our performers down there in addition to regular visitors, it was best to act now. And sure enough, we found a number of signs during the removal which showed the tree’s years were numbered. We’re sorry to see it go, but it was the best way forward for our organization. We want to thank Dirk Wasson and Scott Jensen of Top Hand Tree Service for their excellent work and creating a nice, new view of Elk Horn from the South.

Our next project has also been a long-awaited move. We want to thank the Shelby County Community Foundation for their latest grant award which helped us fund a new video surveillance system. This new system will be critical for our own use, but comes with some added bonuses for our community. That is because we will have a 24/7 livestream of the windmill from the opposite view of the millcam which will be housed fulltime on YouTube. This new angle will stream alongside METC’s millcam and allows our non-local visitors to watch the mill in real time. We’re very excited for this new livestream to debut and expect it to be made public this week.

Finally, we are excited to announce that we are acquiring Gene ‘Beaner’ Thomsen’s Old Danish Workshop. The i’s and t’s have not been dotted and crossed just yet, but soon we will be adding another building to our complex. The woodshop is a necessity for us and will be rebuilt and maintained as one. The retail space will be transformed into a classroom. The intent is to form a new center for the education and preservation of Old World skills that Danish immigrants brought with them such as woodcarving, blacksmithing, etc. featuring hands-on classes and more.

There’s one more announcement coming soon!

We are in the thick of it now as the tourists continue to pour into town. The windmill hosted a number of group tours in June including back-to-back tours on June 19 and another back-to-back on June 28. We even had two tour groups show up just to use the restroom, so one way or another they are finding their way here.

But the month has not been without its challenges. As many are aware, the windmill’s fantail suffered another breakdown shortly after Tivoli Fest. Updates about the repairs were posted on our blog at danishwindmill.org, but the short of it we were saved once again by Mike’s Welding in Kimballton. Mike Mortensen and Shaun spent an entire day up in the air adding a new coupling to the fantail’s axle that should fix the issue once and for all and ensure the gearboxes function better for many years to come. We’re thankful for Mike’s ingenuity and readiness, and that the issues we’ve had with our gearboxes the last several years may finally be behind us.

Elk Horn’s ongoing water issues have presented additional problems. We invest a significant amount of time and money in our flower beds on an annual basis, and have had to refrain from our regular watering schedule in recognition of the city-mandated restrictions. We wish to thank Mike McClain for bringing us a barrel of rainwater collected at Salem. Thankfully we’ve been fortunate with rain, and staff continues to work to water everything by hand until the water issue is finally resolved. To help local residents work around the boil advisory, we hosted a couple food trucks which were well received.

In the gift shop, we have brought in a number of fun items for the Summer, but we remain out of the high-demand electric aebleskiver pans. There is only one manufacturer of these pans and they have been unwilling to import them into the country at the risk of tariffs spiking again when the ship gets to port. Otherwise, we have faired well in getting products in without having to raise prices significantly. However, additional suppliers have already begun raising prices as we nearly the holiday season market time.

We are excited to announce that we will have a new livestream webcam of the windmill by Summer’s end. METC is already in the process of running fiberoptic for it and we should have the camera installation fairly soon as well. This will allow many of our followers at home to watch the windmill in real time and will be announced once available for viewing.

Finally, we wish to thank the volunteers who have helped out the last couple of weeks including Faye Farley who stepped in to help while Shaun was away for his wedding, and Annabelle Baggett who continues to volunteer as a tour guide.

The mill is working properly again! Thanks to Mike Mortensen of Mike's Welding in Kimballton, we have a new U-joint connecting the fantail axle to the gear box which can handle the stress of the current angle. Once the parts came in, we were able to get the new joint on in a few hours and with no welding required. 

This joint should last some time for us and will ensure that other components aren't breaking down unexpectedly within the next few years. It will need to be greased once in awhile, but we'd much rather have that than another emergency later on. 

The downside to all of this is we did have to cut into our budget for a lift to make the repairs. We planned to have this lift in July to perform a bit of maintenance on the lower gearbox and address some other projects. We might have to push back on some of that for the time being, but at least the fantail is working properly again. 

We'll have the sails turning again on the next windy day! 

On Monday this week, we had a sharp wind come from the south with the windmill facing north. The windmill began to adjust accordingly, but at some point that morning, the fantail mechanism failed, and we noticed the fantail spinning freely in the wind, no longer turning the windmill's cap as it spun. 

At first, we assumed the issue was once again the top gear box which was already scheduled for an oil change in July. However, when we finally got a lift up high enough to see what was going on, the problem turned out to be with the fantail's axle. The key holding the joint between the axle and the upper gearbox tore through the shaft until it no longer grabbed and fell out, causing the fantail to lose connection with the gearing. The image above shows the damaged shaft along with a diagram of how a keyed joint is supposed to look.

This same problem happened in 2020 as well, but it has only been an issue since the last major restoration to the cap frame in 2018-2019 when the windmill got it's new windshaft and had major repairs done to the main beams of the cap frame and fantail. 

The problem corresponds to the unlevel angle upon which the fantail sits. When the spars were replaced in 2018, they changed the incoming angle of the axle going into the gearbox. The pink line demonstrates the angle of the axle, while the green line shows the angle of the gearbox opening. If this connection isn't properly aligned on a level plane, it puts unnecessary stress on the keyed joint shown above and the gearbox itself. This explains why the keyed joint failed in 2020 and why the gearbox seals were worn out by 2023. 

While attempts have been made to shim the gearbox closer to level with the fantail in the past year, we believe the damage had already been done. As a result, the problem we currently face is repairing this axle so that it will last. A welded coupling will eventually fail, but we also want to avoid having to get a crane and disassemble the fantail altogether if we can. 

At this time, we're working with a local welder on the solution and hope to have this resolved next week. We are not anticipating high winds over the next few days, and the windmill can still be turned manually if needed. West winds aren't as common, so facing east is generally a good place to be and also makes the worksite accessible with the lift. 

This does also mean that the catwalk will be closed for the time being. Anyone planning tours of the windmill will not have access to it until the repairs are finished. We will provide another update when the repairs are complete.

We also realize this isn't a conventional update, but we as an organization believe our members deserve clarity on issues the mill encounters and how we go about solving them. We believe we have a permanent solution to this issue which will eliminate the need for these kind of emergency repairs every couple of years going forward. 

There is much to share and not a lot of time to share it! As I rush to get this out, along with the Spring issue of The Breeze which still haunts me at night, I’m overwhelmed by all that has taken place over the last month up until this very moment. For those out of the loop, the windmill’s upper gearbox is once again on strike and we are working around the clock (and the weather) to try to get that up and running as soon as possible. In the meantime, however, there is still plenty of exciting news to share along with some secrets I can’t quite reveal just yet.

If there was an elephant in the room, it’s name would be Tivoli. This year’s Tivoli Fest was yet another record year. As our closest followers might recall, the Danish Windmill sponsored a digital billboard directly in the middle of the Omaha metro along i80 which broadcast a Tivoli message for most of May and is currently advertising the windmill until the end of June. This was an expensive project that unfortunately the Iowa Tourism Office chose not to fund, but thankfully we have been able to recoup some of the funds so far via the Shelby County Hotel/Motel Tax grant sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.

The results spoke for themselves. Not only was there a single parking space available in all of town over the weekend, nearly every single business posted record numbers in some form or another. The Museum of Danish America posted one of their best visitor counts in the last 25 years and by far the most in recent times. Kringleman Pastries enjoyed record sales and visitors all weekend long with the Egg Krate, Danish Countryside Winery, and Farmhouse Quilting also enjoying considerable turnouts. Even Elk Horn’s relatively new Seneca Studios, which opened just in time for Tivoli last year, had a massive crowd. Owner Ashley Hansen added: “I had an absolutely incredible turnout for Tivoli! I started an hour early, went two hours over, and still had to turn away dozens of people. The amount of people that came in was absolutely mind-blowing. I did not slow down once, whereas last year I was fairly slow by the end of the day.” Driving local commerce has always been a paramount objective for us at the windmill, so to hear this testimony from local businesses is everything we want to hear. Even the windmill, which doubled its festival turnout last year, still saw a sizable increase this year.

The festival itself was yet again a massive hit, too, from a very busy Friday pre-festival day all the way through the fireworks Saturday night. And to top it off, the recently renovated hotel, Hygge Inn & Suites, enjoyed a full booking in addition to a great turnout for the opening of their event center.  We wish to thank all of the community volunteers who make this event possible, especially the Danish smørrebrød team that works tirelessly in the town hall keeping traditional alive year after year. Courtney Davis and Emily Nelson both stepped into the fire this year as new volunteers for the festival committee and we could not be more appreciative for their help and commitment. With the windmill’s 50^th anniversary colliding with Tivoli next year, we are already thinking ahead about the upcoming celebration and know we will need all of the help we can get.

And speaking of, with such an important milestone on the horizon, a lot of attention was put on the mill’s flowerbeds leading up to Tivoli. Between numerous greenhouse trips and a number of mid-SUV sized loads of soil, the flowerbeds all around the windmill have been completely refreshed with new perennials that we hope will add some needed color around the mill throughout the seasons. To ease the usual burden of watering, and ideally conserve water, we’ve also taken care this year to install an above-ground sprinkler system which has been a fantastic investment in time and water thus far. We’re continuing to work towards next year’s big festivities and need plenty of help, so feel free to reach out this Summer if you would like to get involved in making our grounds as beautiful as can be for what will be more than a run-of-the-mill celebration.

It’s been a minute since our last update and as usual there is much to be shared! We also do want to apologize in the delay in getting this issue out. There has been a lot of work in preparing our gardens for Spring and for Tivoli Fest that had to get done as soon as possible, and we just don’t have the help for those tasks that we used to.

The windmill had some interesting visitors in April including several different parties from Denmark. The Danish National Landscaping Team visited the windmill over Easter weekend where Shaun provided a thorough tour of the windmill and grounds before Tim Palmer took over for a tour of the Museum of Danish America’s campus. The group are eyeing their upcoming Euroskills competition to be hosted by Denmark for the first time this year. This tournament hosts several trade skills including landscaping, masonry, and carpentry. With Denmark hosting this year, Danish teams have been given some leeway and encouragement to train outside the country, and the landscaping team happened to be passing through Elk Horn in between locations.

The windmill also enjoyed a return visit from Ole Mieth before the end of the month. This marked his first time in Elk Horn since 2014 when Ole arrived to inspect the windmill and found the wings to be in exceptionally poor condition, inspiring the Spin Campaign that brought in new wings in 2017-18. Ole’s background in railroad engineering has made him an experienced expert on metal gear systems like those inside and outside the windmill. Ole graciously volunteered some of his time on a trip through the US to inspect all of our gears including the exposed wheels out on the fantail. Everything is in good order and Ole even coated the gears in a fresh layer of water-resistant grease for us.

The windmill also enjoyed a few large group tours so far including a large bus group in April followed by some busy field trips between Atlantic and Audubon third graders followed by the Atlantic Area homeschool group. The wind cooperated most of the time, allowing the kids some time to see how the windmill works and watch the sails go by.

On April 30, we celebrated another community Earth Day with some EEHK middle school students. We didn’t get as big of a group this year, but that didn’t stop the kids from getting mulch spread for us. We’re thankful for EEHK’s willingness to keep this program going and always look forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting some potential new volunteers eager to help us out.

And speaking of volunteers, we want to thank Justin Nelson for helping us out in preparing the gardens for Spring. We have opted to start over in the flower beds surrounding the windmill this year, and it took quite a bit of effort for Shaun and Justin to dig out some of the shrubs that have been there for years. We are almost done getting new flowers in place, and if all goes well, we will also have a new sprinkler system to optimize our garden maintenance and help conserve water. And of course during some of this we discovered one of the spigots burst in the basement, so we have not had a lot of time lately to get some other things done like this paper.

We would like to announce that the windmill has been invited back to Christkindlmarket Des Moines this year and we will be participating in both weekends! We’re excited to be back and hope for some mild weather. We also want to thank the Rasmussen Group of Des Moines for sponsoring our participation.

Finally, we are thrilled to share a couple of internal changes. Joni Griffin stepped down from the Board of Directors and joined our part-time staff at the windmill. In her place, Joanie Heuton has volunteered to join the Board and fulfill Joni Griffin’s term through 2026. We will have some additional vacancies on the Board coming up in January 2026, so please keep us in mind for anyone looking to get more involved in the community and support our cause.