The Queen Bee Mill: A Monument to Overconfidence
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Richard Pettigrew was not a man who doubted himself. When he surveyed the falls of the Big Sioux in the eighteen seventies, he saw not just waterpower but industrial destiny. He imagined flour pouring out of Sioux Falls and into the hungry markets of a growing country, and he set out to build the machine that would make it happen.
Construction on the Queen Bee Mill began in August of eighteen seventy-nine. Pettigrew hired J. W. McKeen of Minneapolis to design it. The main building rose seven stories, eighty by one hundred feet at its base, built entirely from Sioux quartzite quarried at the construction site. Beside it went a four-story grain elevator, a warehouse, a cooper's shop, and a spur connecting all of it to five different rail lines. When the mill opened on October twenty-fifth, eighteen eighty-one, it could process twelve hundred barrels of flour a day, and its elevator could hold one hundred thirty thousand bushels of grain.
It closed about a year and a half later.
Two problems killed it. The first was water. The Big Sioux River at this point simply did not deliver the constant volume of power the mill's turbines required. Summer low water left the machinery running below capacity. The second problem was wheat. The farms of Dakota Territory were not yet producing enough surplus grain to keep a mill of this scale solvent. The investors had bet on a future that was real but had not arrived yet.
The mill sat idle, then changed hands, then sat idle again. On the night of January thirtieth, nineteen fifty-six, fire took the upper floors. What remained, about a story and a half of pink quartzite walls, was too solid to demolish cheaply and too ruined to rebuild. The remains were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-four.
They stand in Falls Park today, the most striking evidence of what happens when ambition outpaces the river it depends on.
