The Falls of St. Anthony

The Falls of St. Anthony, where the Mississippi drops about seventy-five feet over hard limestone above soft sandstone, originally stood near the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers about eight miles downstream and gradually receded as the limestone broke away; had that process continued another 300 yards upstream, the falls would have become uncontrolled rapids, but in the 1870's the Corps of Engineers preserved it for power and navigation with a concrete cutoff dike beneath the limestone cap and a rock and timber apron along the cataract face. Around the falls, St. Anthony on the northeastern bank and Minneapolis on the southwestern side grew as separate communities in the 1850's while Nicollet Island remained largely untouched except for a highway linking bridges across the river, before the two places were consolidated in 1872. The area became a major transportation and industrial center: the Red River Cart Trail, begun in 1844 from Pembina to St. Paul, ran through St. Anthony on Main Street, and in 1858 six hundred carts carried goods valued at $200,000 from the Canadian border region and returned with supplies for Pembina settlers. River navigation was later transformed by the Upper and Lower Locks and Dam, completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of the Upper Mississippi River nine-foot channel, allowing vessels to climb 420 feet from St. Louis to Minneapolis, with the Upper Lock opening to commercial navigation on September 21, 1963, lifting 49.2 feet, and the Lower Lock and Dam, completed in 1956 about one-half mile downstream, lifting 24.9 feet in the first of the two steps needed to pass the falls. The St. Anthony Falls Hydraulic Laboratory of the University of Minnesota became a noted center for graduate training and hydraulic research, working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies on navigation and flood control structures. In July 1680 Father Louis Hennepin first viewed the waterfall from a vantage point near the falls and gave it the name St. Anthony in honor of his patron saint. The Stone Arch Bridge, completed in 1883 by James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway, linked northwestern wheatfields to the great flour mills, while a section was later replaced with steel during construction of the Upper Lock to clear commercial vessels. The University of Minnesota began on land bought October 21, 1854, enlarged two years later by twelve acres sold by Calvin Tuttle for one dollar, and grew into a leading institution of higher learning. Industrial growth around the falls also brought tragedy when the Washburn "A" Mill explosion of May 2, 1878, destroyed the mill and several nearby factories and killed eighteen men. Milling had begun much earlier: soldiers from Fort St. Anthony built the first sawmill in 1821 to supply the new fort, followed by a grist mill for wheat raised near the fort, and settlers later expanded this water-powered enterprise into the great milling industry that gave Minneapolis its name, "The Mill City." In 1849 Colonel John Harrington Stevens was allowed to settle west of St. Anthony on the Fort Snelling Reservation if he maintained a toll-free ferry for soldiers, and his house, later moved because of west-bank industrial development, survived more than a century.

Minneapolis, Minnesota · United States