Gold Medal on the Waterfront: The Sperry Flour Mill
Near Vallejo, California
There is a stretch of Vallejo's northern waterfront where the industrial bones of a different era are still visible, a remnant wharf, a paved peninsula, a towering grain silo backed by a hillside. This is the site of what was, in its time, the largest commercially operating flour mill on the Pacific Coast.
Flour milling began here in eighteen sixty-nine when Captain Abraham Dubois Starr established the first mill on the site. By the eighteen eighties, Starr Mills was already the largest commercial mill on the West Coast. The mill changed hands in nineteen ten when the Sperry Flour Company purchased it, and it changed hands again in nineteen twenty-nine when General Mills absorbed the Sperry company. The flour it made afterward bore the Gold Medal label, the same brand that General Mills still sells today.
At its peak, the Vallejo mill could produce five thousand barrels of flour per day. Flour left this waterfront by ship, traveling to Asia, South America, and across Europe, making Vallejo for a time the largest flour-shipping port in California. During World War One, the mill supplied relief flour to war-devastated Europe, employing three hundred sixty-three workers by nineteen nineteen.
The great fire came on August thirtieth, nineteen thirty-four. A dust explosion inside the mill blew sheets of corrugated metal off the roof. Six thousand tons of grain burned. Most of the mill was destroyed and rebuilt. It continued operating under the Gold Medal brand for another seventy years.
The mill closed in two thousand four. The site remains in industrial use, its historic designation not quite matched by its current condition.
