Replica of XIT's Giant Windmill

The tall mill belonged to Littlefield's Yellow House Ranch, which took over the XIT's southern division in 1901. Ranch headquarters stood at the foot of a yellowish limestone bluff pitted with caves that the Spanish had called Las Casas Amarillas, the Yellow Houses, chosen for its spring water. To tap that water the ranch built eighty-one windmills; the tallest, set up to reach the wind above the escarpment, was reputed to be the world's tallest until it blew down in 1926 and was replaced by a lower tower. The ranch ran up to 27,000 LFD cattle.

What the plaque says

Replica of XIT's Giant Windmill Yellowhouse Division of 3,050,000-acre XIT Ranch built (1887) a 132-foot windmill southwest of here. Set in a canyon, it had to be tall to catch breezes and pump water. It was known as the world's tallest windmill until it was toppled by winds in 1926. This replica was erected May 27, 1969. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  The oldest national wildlife refuge in Texas, a ring of salt lakes in the sandhills south of Muleshoe where tens of thousands of sandhill cranes winter in a wet year.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 33 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 34 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.

More markers nearby

• In Memory of George W. Littlefield — 0.4 mi
• Town of Amherst — 7.6 mi
• Comanchero Trail — 8.7 mi
• One of the Trails of Col. Ranald S. MacKenzie — 9.3 mi