St. Anthony Falls and the Mill City

St. Anthony Falls is the only natural waterfall on the entire length of the Mississippi River. That single fact determined why Minneapolis exists where it does, and what it became.

The Dakota and Ojibwe people knew the falls and had names for them long before European contact. The first European to document them was Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan friar traveling with the La Salle expedition, who visited in sixteen eighty and named the falls after his patron saint. The falls dropped roughly sixteen feet, and that drop, that contained energy, was the reason the city was built here.

By the eighteen sixties, the east bank of the falls held sawmills and then flour mills in increasing density. The limestone bluffs channeled the river through millraces that turned enormous turbines. Minneapolis flour mills were processing Minnesota winter wheat, and the industry was already enormous when, on May second, eighteen seventy-eight, the Washburn A Mill exploded.

The explosion killed eighteen workers. In all, six mills were destroyed. The cause was flour dust ignition: the fine particles suspended in the mill air were as flammable as gunpowder in sufficient concentration. It was one of the worst industrial disasters in Minnesota history.

The response was remarkable. Cadwallader Washburn rebuilt immediately and installed new dust-collection systems. Within two years, the rebuilt mills were processing more grain than before the explosion. By the eighteen eighties, Minneapolis was milling more flour than any other city in the world. The brand that came out of those mills was eventually marketed as Gold Medal Flour.

The Mill City Museum now occupies the ruins of the Washburn A Mill. The Stone Arch Bridge, built in eighteen eighty-three for the railroad, crosses the river just below the falls. Both are part of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area.