Edina Mills

Built in 1857, the flour mill on this site was central to the growth and development of the City of Edina. In 1869, Scots miller Andrew Craik came to the small community then called Waterville Mills, purchased the twelve-year-old business known as Waterville Mills, the Red Mill, and Buckwalter Mill, and renamed it Edina Mills after his boyhood home of Edinburgh. The name soon came to represent both the mill and the growing community around it. Craik and his sons improved and expanded the mill, and they brought in another Scot, George Millam, who served as the Edina Miller for the next twenty years. The mill became widely known as an outlet for feed, flour, and grain, and it was the only mill in the state producing oatmeal and pearl barley. It continued to thrive until about 1895, when the low water level of Minnehaha Creek forced an end to commercial milling. For a time it was used to grind feed for cattle, but it was eventually abandoned and was demolished in 1932. The two-story mill measured forty feet by thirty-six feet, was built of heavy timber covered with vertical twelve-inch-wide boards, and used lumber cut from nearby woods. It had three pairs of millstones, including two sets of French buhrstones assembled from quartz quarried near Paris and a third one-piece run of stones from Ohio. As the upper runner stone rotated above the stationary bedstone, intersecting lands and grooves ground wheat into flour, which was then cooled, sifted, bagged automatically, and labeled Edina Mills Family Flour. Although originally powered by a wooden overshot waterwheel, the mill was soon converted to turbine power, and by 1879 three turbines drove the millstones and other machinery with forty-five horsepower. One thirty-inch-diameter American turbine was recovered from the wheel pit during exploration of the site in 1977; submerged turbines were superior to older waterwheels because they required less maintenance and did not freeze in winter.

Edina, Minnesota · United States