Qualla: De Huinsermolen

De Huinsermolen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elmo87 at Dutch Wikipedia, Public domain. In 1828, five windmills went to work on the Huinserpolder. They had twelve hundred pondemaat — roughly four hundred hectares of low Frisian ground — to keep dry, and the job needed all of them. A year later, a single new mill, taller and smarter than the cluster it replaced, took over the entire workload. De Huinsermolen has been doing that same job ever since: pulling water out of the polder, one Archimedes-screw revolution at a time, in a quiet village called Húns about fifteen kilometers southwest of Leeuwarden.

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Image: Elmo87 at Dutch Wikipedia | Public domain

De Huinsermolen: One Mill Instead of Five

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baykedevries, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. The Huinserpolder — measured the old Frisian way at twelve hundred pondemaat — sits below sea level and exists, like much of the Netherlands, only because someone is always pumping. The five mills that opened the drainage work in 1828 were a stopgap. The following year the local ...

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Image: Baykedevries | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

De Huinsermolen: Archimedes in a Thatched Tower

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bendorp sr., Carel Frederik, Bulthuis, Jan, Public domain. Inside the thatched smock, the machinery is a small lesson in pre-industrial engineering. The Patent sails span 21.80 meters and turn a cast-iron windshaft forged in 1877 by Prins van Oranje of The Hague — a famous nineteenth-century foundry whose castings still turn in mills all...

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Image: Bendorp sr., Carel Frederik, Bulthuis, Jan | Public domain

De Huinsermolen: Diesel and Restoration

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TUFOWKTM, CC BY 3.0. Wind is reliable in Friesland but it is not constant, and by the twentieth century the polder authorities wanted insurance. In 1958 a three-cylinder Lister diesel engine was installed inside the mill itself — a small British workhorse engine designed to run on agricultural sites ...

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Image: TUFOWKTM | CC BY 3.0

De Huinsermolen: Still on the Job

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heydra (Fotograaf), CC BY-SA 4.0. What makes De Huinsermolen worth standing in front of is not that it has been preserved as a monument. It is that it still works. The pumping station next door now handles the bulk of the water-management duty, but the mill is kept in working order and used regularly — sails set,...

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Image: Heydra (Fotograaf) | CC BY-SA 4.0