North Dakota Mill: The Only State-Owned Flour Mill in America

Grand Forks is home to something that exists nowhere else in the United States: a flour mill owned and operated by a state government. North Dakota farmers had long complained that the railroads and the Minneapolis grain exchange were taking their wheat and handing back almost nothing in profit. In nineteen sixteen, the Nonpartisan League, a farmer-driven political movement, swept the state legislature and began building socialist-style infrastructure to cut out the middlemen.

One project was a state-owned bank. Another was a state-owned mill. The North Dakota Mill and Elevator opened on October twenty-second, nineteen twenty-two, in Grand Forks.

It processed the state's wheat into flour and sold it directly to consumers, bypassing Minneapolis entirely. A century later, the mill is still running, still state-owned, and has grown into the largest flour mill in the United States by volume. It is the last survivor of the Nonpartisan League's radical agrarian experiment, and its Dakota Maid brand still lines grocery shelves across the northern plains.