Posts Tagged ‘history’
Intervale Windmill
Cyndie’s brother, Ben Friswold, recently sent me some photos he took of the old windmill from Intervale Ranch which is still standing on the Braemar Golf Course in Edina. The course is undergoing some renovations that had us questioning the fate of the precious relic.
Both Cyndie and Ben separately contacted the course manager to inquire on their plans and let him know of our interest in preserving it. If they weren’t going to keep the old beast, we wanted to have it. Alas, the response was that they love the history of it and thus included the windmill as part of their new design.
I think this is the better place for it, but if they weren’t going to preserve the implement, we would much rather have it than see the metal tossed to a scrap pile.
I’m curious about the markings on the tail that say, “Hays Farm USA.” I rather doubt the naming would have been something my father or grandfather would have done.
More likely, the city of Edina added that. In most of the historical documents I have reviewed about the property, the city identified it as the Hays Farm, as opposed to Intervale.
It has occurred to me that I don’t know if the windmill ever appears in any photos of the Intervale Slideshow I posted a couple of days ago. Wouldn’t that be something if it did.
This morning I searched for old posts on Relative Something where I wrote about the farm and discovered I did that back in July of 2009. If you are interested in reading more about the property, check them out.
You can find them under the category, “Intervale,” or navigate the “Previous Somethings” back to July 2009.
Or, I could provide a link to one of them. More About the Farm seems like a reasonable start. From there you can travel to the ‘previous’ or ‘next’ post on the subject by clicking the links just above the comment box at the bottom of the page.
Many thanks to my golfing brother-in-law, Ben, for keeping an eye on our treasured landmark, and providing the pictures used here!
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Past Views
On Sunday, we are hosting a neighborhood gathering for a cookie social. I was thinking ahead about a way I might match the people we hope will come, with the locations of their homes. I looked at property records online for an overhead view with the house numbers shown. I was considering the possibility of printing it out and having people sign in and mark their location on the map.
Unfortunately, that view, sized for a normal printer, ended up being too small to be much good. I may simply resort to having my computer there with the view that can be zoomed in and out. People could point at their homes on the screen.
While I was looking at the county map, I realized that it is a little different than the Google Earth view with which I am more familiar. I’m pretty sure the county image is older. It occurred to me that I should capture and save both for a historical reference.
Above is the view from the county property records site. Below is the view from Google Earth. It hasn’t changed since we started looking at it in 2012.
I did a search to see if I could learn how often the Google view gets updated. They claim to do so about every 3 years. We are due. I don’t know if that means they will soon post a current view, or that soon they will update it with a view from some time in the recent past.
It won’t be too hard for me to identify if a new view is from a time after we took possession, since we made a wide variety of frequent changes over the last 3 years. I’m particularly interested to see what the labyrinth looks like from space.
I’m also hoping it will be from a time when the horses were out in one of the fields. It would be really nice if that worked out.
As long as I was at it, I ventured over to a view of the old neighborhood in Eden Prairie where my family lived when I was a tween/teenager. I’ll post it here for my brothers and sisters to see. It is recognizable, despite a few changes. The road at the end of our driveway was a 2-lane back in the day, and crossing it led to a farm field, not another neighborhood.
I wonder if there are any photos of this view from back in the 1970s, maybe taken from one of the small planes out of Flying Cloud Airport.
That’s a past view I would particularly appreciate seeing.
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Relative Something 