Billie Wolfe taught housing design at Texas Tech in the 1960s and kept noticing worn windmills in the backgrounds of her farm and ranch photographs. She spent the next thirty years tracking the machines and the people who owned them across the country. In 1992 she bought a collection of restored early windmills from its owner in Mitchell, Nebraska, and in 1993 she and Coy Harris, a Lubbock native who ran Wind Engineering Corporation, founded the museum. The Hundley collection came south as 48 windmills, 171 weights and 56 pumps. Wolfe died early in 1997, and that summer the city gave the group 28 acres of Mackenzie Park.
The original gallery was built big enough to stand wheels 25 feet across indoors, and by 2001 the museum held the largest public collection of restored windmills in the world. Outside, more than 70 historic mills stand on the grounds, some pumping from a well and some recirculating water from a tank. A post mill built in 1978 to commemorate the first windmill in North America, raised in Virginia in 1621, was moved here in 2010.
A second building of 2016 holds early electric wind chargers, some from the 1920s, a Lubbock-made turbine of the 1970s, grinding millstones and a model railroad layout. The 660-kilowatt Vestas turbine of 2005 on its 164-foot tower makes about a million kilowatt hours a year, twice what the museum uses.
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