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MINCO, Okla. (KFOR) – Her car hardly ever touches state highways let alone the interstates.
“I would just rather be on a country road,” she says.
Belva Shelton likes to take her time and be able to pull over quickly if she needs to.
“I don’t want to miss anything,” she continues. “I might not be on that road again.”
A few years back, her kids bought her a nice digital camera and something really did click.
Shelton recalls, “I just started taking pictures of everything.”
She started taking pictures of things that interested her on those back roads, one thing in particular.
“Pretty scenery, wildlife, animals and most of it was windmills.”
She grew up on a farm near Marlow, Okla., drinking sweet water pumped by a windmill.
“I remember how cold and cool, and good that water was,” she chuckles.
That good feeling must have stayed.
It’s been two years now since she started posting her pictures to social media, one windmill shot every day, no stopping.
“I started that,” she says. “I went through year one, and they wanted me to do year two, so now I’ve done two years of it.”
On this fine morning, on the last day of that second year, she spies an old Samson Oil Rite behind the Chisholm Trail Bed and Breakfast south of Minco, probably a 1930s model made by the Stover Company, no longer pumping, but spinning just the same.
“Whatever I see that I like and that I want to show my kids and grandkids, that’s what I’ll stop for.”
These are some of her snapshots of it, a second year in the books, another year just starting.
The wind blows her to the quiet places in Oklahoma where these old relics wait, hanging on for a kind of immortality only Belva Shelton can provide in what is becoming a very large windmill archive.
You can find Belva’s Windmill A Day pictures on the Forgotten Oklahoma Facebook group and on another group called Backroads, Small Towns, Oklahoma.
