A Milling District Timeline

At the Falls of St. Anthony, waterpower development began in 1821–23 when soldiers from Fort Snelling built a gristmill and sawmill near the foot of 7th Avenue South to supply flour and lumber for the fort. Robert Smith of Alton, Illinois, rehabilitated the government mills in 1849 and organized the Minneapolis Mill Company, and the original gristmill was torn down in 1866. In 1856 the Minneapolis Mill Company and the St. Anthony Falls Waterpower Company built the Falls of St. Anthony Dam, and in 1858 the first 235 feet of a waterpower canal were developed. William W. Eastman built the Cataract Mill in 1859, the first originally devoted to flour on the west-side canal, and in the 1860s the Union, Minneapolis, Arctic, and Washburn B flour mills were built along it. Efforts in 1869 to tunnel under St. Anthony Falls to expand waterpower nearly caused the falls to collapse. After St. Anthony and Minneapolis were joined as the City of Minneapolis in 1872, railroad trestles were built over and beside the power canal in 1878 and 1879. On May 2, 1878, an explosion at the Washburn A Mill destroyed six mills, but all were rebuilt within two years, and that same year the Humboldt Mill was completed, today the earliest mill still standing in the district. In the 1880s and 1890s, ownership consolidated as Charles A. Pillsbury and Co. expanded, the Stone Arch Bridge was completed in 1883, major milling companies absorbed numerous properties, and the Northwestern Consolidated Milling Company was created in 1891. Hydroelectric generation began to replace direct-drive waterpower with the completion of the Main Street Hydroelectric Plant in 1894 and a generating plant on Hennepin Island in 1908, when Elevator A, the largest brick elevator ever built, was also added to the district. The Third Avenue Bridge was completed above the falls in 1918. Decline followed as the national flour market shifted to Buffalo, New York, Chicago, and other cities by 1930; mills were torn down, hydroelectric generation reused abandoned mill sites, the North Star Woolen Company building became a warehouse after the company moved to Lima, Ohio, and construction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Lock and Dam in 1960 ended west-side waterpower, followed by the 1965 closing of the Washburn A Mill and the end of flour production on the west side of the river. From 1966 onward, historians, planners, preservationists, archaeologists, and public agencies advanced the district's rediscovery and revitalization through publications, historic designation, planning studies, parkway and park construction, archaeological investigations, building renovations, and the development of Mill Ruins Park, including re-excavation of the main tailrace in 2001 and construction in 2003 of a wood-plank surface along the historic alignment of the main waterpower canal deck.

Minneapolis, Minnesota · United States