The timber mechanism
Original gears and shafts exposed on every floor.
Quistnix at Dutch Wikipedia — CC BY 2.5 · GraphyArchy — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marek Ślusarczyk (Tupungato) Photo portfolio — CC BY 3.0 · Willem Adrianus Korpershoek — CC BY-SA 4.0
Five survive within the town, of an original twenty or so. All are of the tall tower-mill type developed here specifically, and some exceed forty metres, which is a world record height. You can walk between all of them in about ninety minutes along the canals — a short clear route, and the best thing to do in Schiedam after the municipal museum.
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The De Walvisch mill in Schiedam is among the tallest windmills in the world — about thirty-five metres — and Schiedam holds several of that size in one town, which happens nowhere else. The reason is purely economic. Schiedam was the capital of the Dutch jenever industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its hundreds of distilleries needed enormous quantities of grain ground. But the town was crowded with tall buildings that blocked the wind — so the solution was to build mills taller than everything around them, six or seven storeys instead of three. This mill dates from 1794 and still works: grain is genuinely ground by wind on set days, and its floors are visited by stair up to the outer platform overlooking the town and the canals. The original timber mechanism is exposed on every floor, and it is the best practical explanation of how a Dutch windmill works.
Original gears and shafts exposed on every floor.
A view over Schiedam and its canals from above.
Westvest 231, 3111 Schiedam