The West Side Mills

Along Minneapolis's west-side power canal, a dense double row of flour mills and related industrial buildings created a narrow, noisy manufacturing district that, between 1880 and 1930, helped make the city the country's center of flour production and employed thousands of workers. Stretching along 1st Street from the Crown Roller Mill at 5th Avenue to the Palisade Mill at 8th Avenue, the district's mostly brick or stone mills rose at least four stories to use gravity-driven milling, housed increasingly sophisticated machinery that evolved from millstones to steel rollers, and depended on headraces, wheel pits, turbines, and tailraces to turn falling water into mechanical energy. In the 1870s, the middlings purifier ensured the success of Minneapolis mills, while engine houses, warehouses, elevators, and railroad facilities crowded the area and frequent fires repeatedly forced rebuilding and change. By the early 1900s, most production was controlled by Washburn-Crosby Company, Pillsbury Washburn Flour Mills Company, Ltd., and Northwestern Consolidated Milling Company, even as waterpower was giving way to electricity. The district declined in the 1920s as tariff changes and cheaper, more reliable hydroelectric power in other cities undercut Minneapolis, and in 1930 Buffalo, New York, surpassed Minneapolis in flour production while Chicago and Kansas City built new milling complexes, leaving most Minneapolis mills idle. Many were demolished in the 1920s and 1930s, though tailraces and other infrastructure remained buried, flour production continued at the Washburn A Mill until 1965, and surviving structures were converted to warehouses and factories. Today, exposed foundations, tailraces, and canal walls preserve evidence of the engineering and architecture of the district that once made Minneapolis a world leader in flour production.

Minneapolis, Minnesota · United States