Due to spatial constraints in the Daily Grind, we didn't have the space to publish our regular update there, so this article will only appear here. For those looking for the article published in the Daily Grind, look for the "Troll Edition" on the News and Updates page. 

March was another busy month for the windmill and for Elk Horn. News that the Museum of Danish America is receiving a Thomas Dambo troll has generated much excitement as work is slated to begin next week on constructing it. Meanwhile at the windmill, a few of our own projects have made significant progress. 

First and foremost, we wish to extend our sincere gratitude to the Scan Design Foundation, who are supporting the overhaul of danishwindmill.com with a $10,000 grant. More will be shared on the website changes next month, but there is much to be excited for. The consolidation of the .com and .org websites has been a daunting challenge for some time now, but we're confident we have found the best solution. And contrary to previous announcements, the new website will remain danishwindmill.com and all .org traffic will be redirected there. Once the new website is live, possibly by June, this website that you are currently reading this on will be shut down. But don't worry, we will continue this blog on the new site and migrate existing articles over there for reference as well. 

Speaking of grants, we have been awarded $4,989 by the Shelby County Community Foundation towards replacing the roof on our new Education & Preservation Center. With the current roof now over 30 years old and deemed uninsurable, it was important that we addressed it as soon as possible, especially as we hope to power the entire building with solar panels in the near future. Work on the roof will begin shortly, but unfortunately, the grant only covers about half of the estimated cost, so we will be looking to fundraise another $5,000 to help keep us close to our operations budget for the year. 

Otherwise, work on the Center is progressing nicely. The classroom portion has been redone with fresh paint and a new floor as of last week. Mike Howard, Johanne Lyager, Sarah Sayres, and Gene Thomsen all volunteered their time to assist with the transformation. Next up we will be focusing on dust collection and finalizing electrical lines in the woodshop. New light fixtures are needed in the classroom, and then we can look into furnishing the space with work tables and chairs, and a presentation tech suite. 

Finally, work on the millstones has progressed significantly. The stones are almost finished and will be shipped to Mollebygger Petersen's warehouse in Denmark. They will remain stored there until we are able to fundraise to have them shipped to Elk Horn and eventually installed. 

The Danish postkasse has shipped. Thanks to the assistance of Brenda Nelson and Tony Hough, we were able to purchase one during the auction in January. It will be prominently displayed in the entryway along with our new community bulletin board for advertising local events and promotions. We can't wait to see it and get it displayed. 

Other exhibit changes are underway as well to make room for an upcoming exhibit on electrical generation inside the windmill. The famous LEGO windmill made by Steven Howard has been relocated into the video room, and other pieces on the ground floor of the windmill have been relocated to make space for the next exhibit which will feature the mill's history as a wind turbine alongside a modern Siemens model. We will also have a vintage-looking factory lights to indicate when the sails are running. One in the windmill and one in the entryway. 

On an administrative note, the windmill will be shifting back to Summer Business Hours starting today, March 30. We will be closing at 5PM during the week and open 10 - 4PM on Sundays. We are considering extending these hours further during the Summer if we get lots of Troll Traffic. 

Finally, Tivoli Fest is just around the corner. This year, we're re-extending the festival to Sunday with some special morning activities sponsored by the windmill for our 50th anniversary. From 8 - 11AM, there will be a breakfast buffet at the Hygge Inn catered by Master Grillers, pricing to be determined. Also starting at 8AM, we will have a "Tour de Tivoli" bike-ride starting at the hotel, heading west to Prairie Rose State Park, north to Hwy 44, east to Kimballton, and south back into Elk Horn. Registered participants will receive a FREE 50th anniversary t-shirt and a food voucher. More details coming soon. 

Following the morning activities, Elk Horn Lutheran Church will be hosting their Sunday service outside the windmill at our Morning Star Tiny Chapel at 11:15. Then at midday, there will be an encore Viking performance. The windmill will be open with free admission the rest of the day and Norse Horse Tavern will be serving breakfast and lunch options until 2PM. 

Updates about these events including how to register for the bike ride will be coming soon. Proceeds from the bike ride and breakfast will go towards the purchase of our millstones. 

**The following was published in the April 2026 issue of the Daily Grind. Another article we published separately on here with updates related the mill itself**

This isn’t the article we intended for this issue, but changing circumstances have demanded a shift in focus. What was supposed to be an elaborate ruse on the windmill moving back to Denmark following the discovery of a 50-year lease agreement in a secret basement beneath the mill, is now something a bit more serious and resonant with our readers.

Sharp winds of change are whirling towards the Danish Villages, and as mills and wheels are set into motion, we ask for a moment, that we pause briefly to consider the significance of this unique historical moment we find ourselves in.

The arrival of a Dambo troll did not come out of no where. It stemmed from a deeper timeline that includes the establishment of the Danish Inn, the relocation of a windmill from Denmark, and the groundbreaking of the nationally-accredited Museum of Danish America. These milestones, achieved by determination and volunteerism, have climaxed with the momentous arrival of a troll that stands to transform the very fabric of our community.

Similar changes were underway 50 years ago. The arrival of the windmill excited local residents into a full-on facelift of town infrastructure and businesses, resulting in anything from the addition of windmills to logos and street signs to artistic reimaginations of Elk Horn storefronts to look more unified and culturally-distinct.

Several businesses in Elk Horn, particularly the restaurants, are already shifting gears in anticipation. Towns with Dambo trolls have recorded annual visitor increases in the tens of thousands, and with Elk Horn’s unique Danish background to consider, there is good reason to believe this particular troll will be a special one for Dambo’s followers. The Kringle Man is currently working on plans to offer enhanced breakfast options and Norse Horse Tavern is restructuring their business hours to be open on Sundays. The windmill itself may even have to consider extending our hours passed 5pm, which will be the norm again starting March 31.

This moment will only last as long as we let it. The troll will be built in a flash, but it shares a legacy with the windmill and MoDA that may extend generations if local residents are willing to put in the effort to preserve it. The outpouring of support for this project so far has been promising, but it can’t stop there. Maintaining what we built will be the true challenge ahead.

It’s been another typical February at the mill, not nearly as many visitors but the same amount of work. We’ve been busy gearing up the gift shop for Spring, preparing new exhibits, and chipping away at the new Education & Preservation Center. Shaun’s been putting in extra time on weekends to try and move things along and MoDA’s interim executive director, Erik Andersen, has also been around to help. We’re still waiting for the electricians to finish the second leg of work, and for a warm day to replace some of the windows.

Behind the scenes, the windmill has finally begun the anticipated work of building a new website. While not much can be said yet, we know this will be a welcome change for our supporters and customers alike. Due to budgeting constraints, the project is being broken up into distinct phases. Our attention will be first focused on building a new public-facing site with our updated content and branding. Once that is published, we will begin working on overhaulling our ecommerce platform. This project will complete the merger of our two websites: danishwindmill.com/.org and increase the ability of our visitors to make full use of the site on mobile platforms.

Separately, the basalt rock for our new millstones has been cut at a quarry in the Netherlands and delivered to Bas Batenburg for shaping and dressing. We’ll be sharing pictures once we have them as the new millstones continue to move along in the production process. We’re excited to hear more and will share once we do.

The windmill’s livestream on YouTube is also, finally, live and has now been public for a record-breaking seven days. You can find the livestream on our YouTube channel: @danishwindmill1848. The camera features the windmill from the Southwest, almost directly opposite METC’s millcam. It is also hooked onto our backup power, so that in the event of storms, provided we have internet, it will remain live. The Museum of Danish America has also published a prairie cam which can be found on their YouTube channel.

The windmill is also partnering with Iowa Western Community College this semester. Two student interns have been tasked with building a software for us to pair with our Welcome Center guestbooks. This software will offer us a better means of converting and maintaining our guestbook data in digital form. Once finished, we will be able to use our guestbook entries to determine visitor patterns including where most of our visitors are coming from and how this might change over the course of the year. Unfortunately, the state of Iowa hasn’t been interested in developing such a tool on behalf of its Welcome Centers, but we’re happy to partner with IWCC to make our own.

In the gift shop, we’ve brought in a few new items including new styles of the ever-popular Gry & Sif felt flowers. Varieties now include roses, hydrangeas, hyacinths, coneflowers, and cosmos. Complete the floral ensemble with some of our new paper decorations from Livingly. We quickly sold out of our Livingly Christmas-themed paper decorations and had to bring in some of their Spring items including single-and-multi-flowered mobiles as well as butterfly mobiles.

Tivoli planning has also begun and we have already spearheaded some new twists for this year, which is not only the windmill’s 50th anniversary, but also the 50th anniversary of the celebration that became Tivoli Fest for good by 1980. We will be hosting a breakfast buffet on Sunday, May 24 at the Hygge Inn and food will be provided by Master Grillers. In conjunction with this, work is underway to revive the Tour de Tivoli bike ride which looped to Prairie Rose and the mermaid. More details to come. The Tivoli Committee is looking for volunteers for this year’s festivities. Look for event details at tivolifest.com.

And speaking of bikes, news was broken that Iowa’s annual RAGBRAI event will be passing from Harlan to Guthrie Center on Day 2 of the event. Specificities of the route including the designated pass-through towns are expected to be announced in April.

It’s the slow time again as tourism slows to a crawl. While there has still been plenty to do at the mill, there isn’t a lot going on worth sharing, but still have some updates to put out.

Phyllis Hoegh has finished the count and the guestbook numbers are done. The Mill received 69,466 visitors last year. This includes guests from all 50 states in addition to 35 foreign countries. We even had 272 visitors from Denmark.

Speaking of the Welcome Center, we are taking the downtime to clean up our brochure area and get everything reorganized. This includes removing brochure space off of one wall to make room for our new community bulletin board where local organizations and residents can share information about upcoming events. Thumbtacks provided.

In the gift shop, we finished with another stellar year even despite the snowy weekends of November and December. Sales revenue hit its best figure since 2003, and we remain hopeful that the trend will continue this year. We continue to bring new lines of merchandise into the store including some new Blue Delft decor which is now on the shelves. Our 2026 collectibles from Royal Copenhagen and Bing & Grøndahl are also available. The Christmas plate designs this year are both stunning and the cat figurine has already been sold out temporarily.

The windmill held its annual organization meeting on Monday, January 26 with exceptional attendance of 78 members. Given that this year is our 50th anniversary, we switched things up a bit for the occasion. The meeting was held at the renovated Hygge Inn & Suites now open as a hotel and event venue. And, as a gesture of appreciation, all members were treated to a complementary Danish meal catered by Master Grillers Catering of Kimballton.

The meeting itself was also very productive. A petition was pushed forth by members this year to amend and update the current Bylaws which were last revised in 2000. Notable changes include more flexible language around quorum and when the annual meeting can be held, as well as membership dues, which are now decided by the Board and no longer encoded in the Bylaws in specific amounts. For 2026, the individual annual and family annual memberships remain at $10 and $20, respectively. However, lifetime memberships were raised to $250 and $500 for individual and family plans.

Three new board members were elected for 2026: Tim Andersen (Audubon), Jimmy Cogdill (Kimballton), and Mike Howard (Elk Horn). We also wish to thank Andy Anderson (Elk Horn), Brandon Baggett (Elk Horn), and Tony Petersen (Kimballton) for their service on the Board. Anderson and Petersen both served the full extent of 9 consecutive years or three terms.

Shaun discussed upcoming projects for this year as well as plans for the Education & Preservation Center which is still in process of being renovated. The current roof needs to be replaced and the inside is still in need of work in both rooms, but mainly the classroom at this point.

We also debuted our 50th anniversary logo which is currently being printed onto t-shirts and other souvenirs to mark the occasion. The design was completed by local artist, Deborah King. It was partly inspired by the 1977 Bing & Grøndahl plate of the windmill in Nørre Snede, Denmark. Blue plates have always been central to our organization, and we felt it best to commemorate our golden year with a similar aesthetic. T-shirts are already up for preorders on our website.

Looking ahead, the mill will be participating at the Omaha Home & Garden Show at the CHI Center from Feb. 27 to Mar. 1. Kringleman Pastries will also be there.

Finally, if all goes well, this article will debut in a new local news section of the Harlan newspaper. Readers are invited to check out past issues and articles at danishwindmill.org.

Our year came to a soft close as snow hampered our final events. First, Julefest, then our annual market in Des Moines. All in all, we ended the year better than expected, but it’s tempting to ask what could have been had the weather held out for either of these events.

For those who don’t know, Christkindlmarket Des Moines is an annual outdoor Christmas market stylized after German-themed festivals in Europe. We have been regular vendors there for 7 years now, and have seen the festival grow exponentially over the last couple of years. Our participation is kind of a last hurrah of the year for us and helps generate enough revenue to typically carry us to Spring when tourism traffic picks up again. The Rasmussen Group in Des Moines kindly sponsors some of the event costs for us as well.

This was the first year that Christkindlmarket went two weekends. Both the windmill and Kringleman Pastries participated in both weekends this year. The first weekend proved to be okay temperature-wise. It was cold, but not unbearable, but snow showers on Friday and Saturday blanketed all of our product which of course was outside our hygge hut. Thankfully, the snow was dry and brushed off easily, but it came down relentlessly both nights. It made everything look pretty except the register tape. We wish to thank Nicole Butler and Jon Adams for volunteering to help us out the first weekend. We hope they had enough fun to consider coming back with us next year.

Unfortunately, the second weekend was worse. We had more snow and severely cold temperatures. The festival remained open, with slightly shortened hours over the weekend, and we were surprised with just how many people came out anyway. It was enough business to recoup the costs of going, but it was still overall a disappointing year. The Museum of Danish America also briefly volunteered in the beer tent on Thursday night.

Afterwards, we loaded our 20' box truck back up with stuff and came back to Elk Horn. We want to thank Justin Nelson for helping us get much of the shelving and other supplies put out of the way.

We don’t plan on doing two weekends for this festival again. It’s too much work, and the risk for bad weather the second weekend is always high. Between working both weekends, Julie shipped out over 150 packages as this is also the final stretch for our mail orders as well. Whether or not the festival will continue to hold over two weekends remains to be decided, but we don’t have the capacity to make it work, as tempting as it is.

The rest of December moved rather quickly. We’ve enjoyed the pictures of the mill with the lights on that local residents have been sending us. We’ve also had some surprising traffic in the store. Once Christmas passed, we turned our focus onto inventory and expect to be done with that in early January.

We also wish to note that we did experience a sharp increase in scammer traffic and payment fraud to end the year both in our webstore and via electronic donations. It’s nothing we can’t handle, but is an incredible amount of unnecessary work.

On a more positive note, this was a good year for us and we hope to build on it in 2026, the windmill’s 50th year in Elk Horn. We hope you’ll join us at the Annual Meeting on January 26th so we can kick off our celebrations together. 

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!