After nearly two years of digging through history online, I was as anxious to get outside as any other Minnesotan, so when the Minnesota Historical Society offered a walking tour of the Mississippi riverfront, I was ready.
A small group gathered at the Mill City Museum, 704 S. 2nd Street, where we were met by our guide, Fred. Fred hadn’t given a tour in 14 months and was very excited to lead a group again. His enthusiasm was contagious.
He began by reminding us that the riverfront we looked out on was once the gathering place for many Native American tribes including the Dakota, the Winnebago and the Iowa. “The first Europeans didn’t get here until 1680,” he said, when Father Louis Hennepin arrived. Hennepin was sent by French explorer Robert de La Salle, who was searching for a trade route to China and hoped the Mississippi River would provide the connection.
Fred pointed out that St. Anthony Falls, named by Hennepin for the patron saint of travelers, was farther downstream in Hennepin’s time than it is today. If not for the concrete apron placed over the falls by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1876, the only natural waterfall on the entire river would be nothing but rapids today, washed away at the rate of 3 feet per year.
Part of the erosion was due to the natural composition of the riverbed itself. The rest of it was caused by man-made activity on the east bank of the river. In 1868, William Eastman and John Merriam decided to build a tunnel under Hennepin Island and the river so they could build a power plant on Nicollet Island that would compete with the nearby St. Anthony Falls Water Power Company. Work on the tunnel had been going on for a year when the sandstone ledge under the river gave way, taking a huge chunk of the falls with it. That’s when the Corps of Engineers was called in.
Harnessing water power was an early pioneer activity along the West Bank.
A grist mill was set up near present-day 2nd Street and Portland Avenue in the 1820s. One day Col. Josiah Snelling ordered bread from the mill. It was made from sprouted wheat, which rendered a disgusting black bread. The soldiers downriver at Fort Snelling took the bread and their rifles and threw them to the ground. To make amends, Fred said, Snelling broke open barrels of whiskey and the soldiers went on a three-day drunk.
A grinding stone stands near the entrance to Mill Ruins Park. Stones often wore out grinding the hard red winter wheat produced in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Stone dressers would take metal picks and chip “teeth” back into the stones so they could be used again. After many years of dressing stones, these men often had little pieces of metal embedded in their arms. When they sought work at a new mill, the miller would gauge their experience by asking to “see their metal.”
During the 1850s, the area around St. Anthony Falls was a tourist attraction. People from southern climates came to escape the heat of summer and soak in warm pools of water for their health. Often, they stayed at the six-story Winslow House Hotel on the east bank, where the Lourdes Square townhouses stand today. But the river soon became industrialized.
Cadwallader Washburn of Lowell, Mass., built the first modern flour mill on the river in 1866. It was six stories tall and had 12 pairs of millstones. It ground out 840 barrels of flour a day. Folks called it “Washburn’s folly,” and said he’d never make a profit.
Charles Pillsbury of New Hampshire saw what Washburn was doing and decided to get into the flour business, too. Although he had no experience in flour milling, he built a mill, the Pillsbury “A” mill, on the opposite bank of the river. To tweak his rival, he had it built larger than Washburn’s. However, his architect, Leroy Buffington, made errors in his calculations and the walls of the mill began to lean; buttresses were added to the outside walls in the 1890s to keep them upright.
In 1874, the prosperous Washburn, a Civil War veteran and former Minnesota governor (1872-74), built his second, “A” mill where the Mill City Museum stands today. It operated for four years until May 1878, when a spark somewhere in the building caused volatile grain dust in the air to explode. Eighteen employees lost their lives. Washburn, who visited the scene a day later, immediately made plans for a bigger, safer mill on the site. Soon, the mill cranked out two million pounds of flour per day. “Between 1880 and 1930, Minneapolis fed the world,” said Fred.
Unlike old-fashioned grist mills with a waterwheel at their side, the mills that sprang up along the riverbank didn’t take their power directly from St. Anthony Falls. Instead, the mill owners built a series of raceways below the falls. River water was partially re-directed in to a headrace, then fell through tunnels that ran through the mill and powered the machinery. The water rejoined the river at a tailrace below the factory. Fred told us there are “hundreds of miles of tunnels” along both sides of the river.
By 1869, there were eight flour mills operating on the West Bank. But flour milling wasn’t the only industry on the river. Just a block down from the Washburn A Mill was the North Star Woolen Mill.
The North Star Mill, built in 1866, was the only textile mill built on the Mississippi, using wool from Minnesota and Wisconsin sheep to make uniforms for the Union Army. In 1870, workers there could card 800 pounds of wool per day. The mill employed 34 men, 32 women and four children. By the 1920s, North Star had become the largest blanket manufacturer in the nation.
Like the flour mills, it was a dirty place to work. Women were paid 90 cents per day to work in the lint-filled weaving room. Newspaper reporter Eva McDonald Valesh caused a local sensation when she worked undercover at the mill for two weeks and published an exposé on working conditions there.
In 1925, a new building was built around the old mill, which was torn down brick by brick as the larger mill grew around it. Most of the blankets made by North Star were produced on contract for the government and for hotels. North Star also made blankets for Pullman railroad cars and Northwest Airlines before Minnesota’s high corporate tax rate caused it to close down in 1949.
Fred took us partway across the Stone Arch Bridge to look at St. Anthony Falls and the now-closed Upper St. Anthony Lock and Dam, closed to river traffic in 2015. Behind us was the Washburn A Mill, gutted by fire in 1991 and opened as a museum in 2003. That same year on the East Bank, Pillsbury’s A Mill, once the world’s largest flour mill, shut down and was later converted to artist loft apartments. Through it all, the only constant was the river.
Next month: A walk along Main Street
Additional sources
https://history.generalmills.com/the-story.html
https://www.mnopedia.org/event/st-anthony-falls-tunnel-collapse-october-5-1869
Historic American Engineering Record, North Star Woolen Mill, National Park Service, May 1998
Minneapolis Riverfront Walking Tours are scheduled July 24, Aug. 7 and 21, and Sept. 4 and 18. Cost is $14; Minnesota Historical Society members receive a 20% discount. Tickets: https://www.mnhs.org/millcity/activities/tours.
Below: A stereopticon view of the Washburn A Mill explosion in 1878. Women working in the weaving room at North Star Woolen Mill, 1905. (Provided by Minnesota Historical Society)