Öland windmill 1 by Marc Hollenberg

The vast majority of today's Öland mills are stump mills from the end of the 1700th century or the beginning of the 1800th century. The term stub mill is explained by the fact that the mill house rests on a large stump. When the blades before grinding are to be turned against the wind, the entire mill house is turned around the fixed stump. The model is very archaic and windmills with a similar construction have existed in Sweden from around the year 1300. The first time an Öland mill is mentioned in text is the year 1546. We do not know how old the oldest of today's preserved mills is. There are probably mills that in any case have some parts preserved from the 1600th century or earlier. At Borgholm's city museum, there is a salvaged heart block with the year 1441 engraved on it.

During the 1700th century, the number of windmills more than quadrupled. From 1699 to 1808, the number rose from 375 to 1677. The largest increase was from the middle of the 1700th century, during the same period that the grist mills gradually disappeared. In a royal letter from 1808 there were provisions aimed at discouraging the building of more mills on the island. From 1808 to 1822, the number of windmills only increased from 1677 to 1713. The information that there were 1677 windmills in 1822 comes from Öland's priest Abraham Ahlqvist's book Öland's Historia och Beskrivning. According to Ahlqvist, the mills were most densely packed in Vickleby parish, where there were 77 of them. Around the turn of the century in 1900, the number of windmills on Öland decreased drastically. Initially, most mills were demolished in the southern and central part of the island, where the modernization of agriculture went fastest. The small stump mills were replaced by new technologically superior mills – first the large Dutch mills, then steam mills and mills powered by crude oil. Eventually, there were also electrically powered mills and mills that could be connected to the farm's tractor. Öland's Mills Association, formed in 2008, carried out an inventory recently, where it was concluded that today there are 351 mills left on the island.