USA - Wind turbine is taken for its first spin

For the first time since the wind turbine at Mark Richey Woodworking went up a few weeks ago, its enormous blades have begun to turn.

Although the city's tallest structure — at 292 feet tall — is now set up and functioning, it still needs to be connected to the electrical grid.

The company is organizing an event in March to celebrate the first spin of the 600-kilowatt Elecon TurboWinds turbine as it starts to generate power. Final tests are continuing.

The turbine will generate power to help run the 80,000-square-foot property in the industrial park and will produce about 1 million kilowatt hours a year.

But even as the slow-churning blades catch people's attention, it's not the first time in Newburyport's past that the enormous blades of a single wind tower have dominated the skyline.

Jay Williamson, director of the Historical Society of Old Newbury, dug out a 1796 drawing of the city that shows an enormous windmill towering over what is now Bartlet Mall. At the time, it owned the skyline over State Street, and from the drawing's vantage point in Salisbury, the windmill competed with the city's four church steeples.

According to John J. Currier's history of Newbury, three men won the right in 1703 to build a windmill on a hill near Frog Pond, about halfway between where the Superior Courthouse and the George Washington monument stand today. At the time, there was a hill at that spot.

"I thought what was interesting is that from the perspective of coming over the Gillis Bridge, the wind turbine is just a few degrees to the right of where the windmill would have been," Williamson said.

Currier speculated that the windmill was probably used for grinding corn or wheat, at least until 1774 when the hill was leveled for a training field. The windmill was moved closer to the burying ground and disappears from the records around 1800.

"After 200 years, we've returned to wind power," Williamson said.