The windmill in North Anson on Route 16 is being renovated. (Laura Dunham photo) NORTH ANSON — Just close your eyes and imagine the enemy coming up the highway as you stand some 50 feet in the air watching from the observation tower located beside the Myron and Faye Seavey farm on Route 16.

The Bailey windmill was built in 1905. During WWII it was used as an observation tower for the military.

Inside the tower is a spiral stairway that leads to the balcony, said Seavey. On the ground floor was a well and pump that supplied the water to the farm which burned in 1915 except for the windmill.

Emily Quint said that volunteers spent more than a month last year working on the balcony.

The windmill was given to the town of Anson around 2005 by Winston McLean and is currently being renovated with new siding and shingles. The renovation is a project of the Anson Historical Society and the Town of Anson headed by Mitchell Quint, president of the society, and assisted by Raymond Wacome, who is striving to be an Eagle Scout.

“Us kids used to sleep in the top of the windmill; there were no mosquitoes,” Eldon McLean, who was born in 1929 at the farm which at that time was owned by the McLean family said.

Seavey said that the windmill has been chartered to the National Registrar of Historical places in Maine in 1988 as part of the National Park Service, Department of Interior.

If anyone would like to make a tax-exempt donation toward the project, they can send it to the Anson Historical Society Box 572, North Anson, Maine 04911.