Moulin de Valmy, Post mill in Valmy, Marne, France

The Moulin de Valmy is an open trestle post mill: a rectangular body of vertical wooden boards on a cross-shaped base of timber beams, with a steep dark roof and four lattice sails on a wooden windshaft. Its trestle has three crosstrees instead of the usual two, giving six pairs of doubled quarterbars. Inside are two pairs of millstones set head and tail.

A windmill was first recorded at Valmy in 1634; the mill standing in 1792, worked by Nicolas Thomas, was burned on 20 September that year on General François Kellermann's orders because Prussian artillery used it as an aiming point. Rebuilt, it was demolished in 1831 as local watermills outcompeted it. A post mill brought from Attiches, Nord, was inaugurated in September 1947, listed as a Monument historique on 10 May 1989, felled by Cyclone Lothar on 26 December 1999 and rebuilt on 20 September 2005.

The mill's name is tied to the miller Nicolas Thomas, who was working it on 20 September 1792 when it was burned on Kellermann's orders. A public subscription launched in 1939 paid for the Attiches mill brought here, and the Association pour la promotion du moulin de Valmy, founded in 2000, still runs the site.

The mill stands on the heights above Valmy, reached on foot from the village; the ground is open and exposed, so expect wind. The semi-underground Centre historique Valmy 1792, designed by Pierre-Louis Faloci, was built just below the mill in 2014 and is the place to start a visit. The sails were destroyed in a storm in May 2022, so the mill may appear without them.

The trestle under the mill is built with three crosstrees instead of the usual two, giving six pairs of doubled quarterbars. The mill also holds two pairs of millstones set head and tail along the wooden windshaft. Its four sails broke off in a storm on 4 May 2022.