The Ohio State-Marion Campus Prairie at the Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Lab is a 12-acre restored tallgrass prairie that includes a 6500 square foot (0.15 acre) pond that is presently fed only by ground water and rain. There is a windmill that is not longer functional.
The windmill, from its the pond’s origin around 1990 pumped water to the pond, from a well that might still be usable. Here is a photo from when ithe pond and windmill were was new. On the left you can see the pipe from the windmill pump to the pond (it no longer exists). On the right below the dock is the outflow to Grave Creek, which still functions, limiting the depth of the pond, which is usually 1 foot or two lower than that (avarage depth estimated to be 2 feet. Whether the outflow from the pump actually contributed substantially to the volume of water in the pond is uncertain, but .any water input to the pond would be an ecological benefit.
About 2004 there was a mishap that rendered the windmill and pump nonfunctional. There used to be an attractive hand-crank style spigot with a handle that directed water through a faucet for use filling buckets. It sat upon a concrete pad supporting the pipe that ran down the well. This was in addition to the outflow to the pond. The desgin flaw was that was that there were on/off valves for both these outflows (to the pond and through the spigot), and someone accidentally turned them both off. That caused there to be no relief for the negative pressure that was caused by the windmill trying to pump water that had nowhere to go, causing the concrete pad to be pulled up and sideways and the long wood and metal pumping rod to be bent. Note: the pretty hand-crank style spigot has been discarded and the brass pump (the “cylinder”) that worked underground is in still in oor possession. The photo below shows the windmill in its current state.
The openuing to the well sits directly below the center of the windmill structure.
In 2009 we disassembled the nonw non-functional windmill.
The portion on the right side of the photo shows a juncture of some sort. Here is is enlarged.
The cylinder has been in storage for decades.
