Built in 1908, the Murph was once the largest windmill in the world – measuring in at a towering 95 feet with massive 114 ft sails. The windmill was funded in part from a $20k donation from Samuel G. Murphy (a banker) and built to avoid paying exorbitant water rates to the Spring Valley Water Company. It was capable of pumping around 40,000 gallons an hour and helped transform the San Francisco sand dunes (the “Outside Lands”) into the lush, verdant Golden Gate Park that occupies that land today – alongside its sister, the Dutch Windmill. By 1913 electric pumps had begun to take over the job of the ‘San Francisco Giants’ and they fell into disrepair for more than 30 years before restoration began. Murphy Windmill reopened in 2012, but the interior is still not accessible to the public.
The Murphy Windmill is a smock mill, a specific design where only the top “cap” rotates on a circular track (called a curb) to face the sails into the wind.
The entire 68-ton copper-clad cap (or dome) is designed to swivel. Because of this, there are two sets of stairs leading to the top gear room – the fifth level – where a massive gear (the wallower) is turned by the sails to then transform that horizontal rotation into vertical rotation. At times, one of those sets of stairs may be inaccessible due to the rotation of the cap, so you can see – here – that both are currently open to allow abundant access to staff.
