Danish Windmill

The mill was built in Denmark in 1848 and worked there for more than a century before it fell into disuse. In the 1970s the people of Elk Horn, determined to honor their Danish heritage, bought the mill, had it carefully taken apart in Denmark, and shipped the pieces across the Atlantic to Iowa. Volunteers then reassembled it board by board, raising an authentic piece of Denmark on the American prairie.

It remains one of the very few genuine Danish windmills in the United States, not a replica but the real thing, moved across an ocean by a community proud of where it came from. The effort captured national attention at the time and gave Elk Horn a landmark that draws visitors from across the country to see and to climb.

Inside, the windmill preserves the machinery that made it a working mill: the sails turn a great shaft, which drives wooden gears that spin heavy millstones to grind grain into flour. Visitors can climb through the levels of the mill to see this mechanism up close and understand how wind power was harnessed for centuries before engines and electricity.

On a breezy day the mill can still turn, and the heritage shop below sells stone-ground flour along with imported Danish goods, foods, and gifts. Seeing the mill in operation connects visitors to the daily life of the Danish villages the settlers left behind, where such windmills stood at the center of the community.

Elk Horn and neighboring Kimballton form the largest rural Danish settlement in the United States, founded by immigrants who came from Denmark in the late nineteenth century to farm the western Iowa prairie. The towns held onto their language, their Lutheran faith, their foods, and their customs, and they still celebrate Danish festivals and traditions today.

The heritage runs deep enough that the region is home to the Museum of Danish America, a national museum of the Danish immigrant experience, and Kimballton features a replica of Copenhagen's famous Little Mermaid statue. Together with the windmill, these sites make the area a small slice of Denmark set down in the Iowa cornfields.

The rolling farmland of western Iowa is the ancestral homeland of the Ioway, for whom the state is named, along with the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples who lived and traveled across this part of the Midwest. Their descendants remain part of Iowa today, with the Meskwaki owning their Settlement to the east near Tama.

The Danish immigrants who settled here in the nineteenth century broke the tallgrass prairie into farms and built the towns that still carry their heritage. Their windmill, brought all the way from the old country, stands as a reminder of the many peoples who have shaped Iowa, and of how strongly a community can hold onto its roots.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.