Wheat Country: From Homestead to Hard Red Spring

The prairie of southwestern Minnesota was among the best wheat-growing land on earth, and the settlers who came in the eighteen sixties and seventies knew it the moment they turned the first furrow. The soil was black and deep, built by thousands of years of prairie grass, and the climate, cold winters that killed crop disease, hot dry summers that cured the grain, was suited to the wheat variety that would eventually be called hard red spring.

The railroads made the bonanza possible. The Northern Pacific Railroad pushed into the Red River Valley in the early eighteen seventies, and within a decade the valley was producing wheat at a scale that stunned observers. Bonanza farms of ten thousand acres or more were being operated with mechanical reapers and steam threshers by wage laborers who moved seasonally across the plains following the harvest, sleeping in bunkhouses and eating in cookhouses that traveled with the machinery.

The flour mills of Minneapolis were the processing end of this system. Minneapolis spring wheat flour, particularly the high-gluten, protein-rich flour that came from hard red spring wheat, became the premium product in American and eventually European baking. The mills pioneered a new milling technique in the eighteen seventies that used rollers rather than millstones, breaking the wheat kernel in stages that produced a finer, whiter, more uniform flour. The brand name that came to represent this flour was Gold Medal, produced by the Washburn-Crosby Company and later, after a series of mergers, by General Mills.

General Mills was founded in Minneapolis. Pillsbury was founded in Minneapolis. Both companies grew from the combination of Minnesota wheat and the milling technology developed at St. Anthony Falls, and both remained headquartered in the Twin Cities for most of the twentieth century. The wheat economy of the Red River Valley and the prairie southwest funded the universities, the cultural institutions, and the civic ambition of a state that had been, within the memory of its first settlers, entirely empty of European presence.