For the second year in a row Mill City Museum in downtown Minneapolis has been nominated as one of the top 20 museums in the country by USA Today.
"It's definitely, you know, an honor to be listed on this list," says Mill City Museum spokesman David Stevens. You're right, there are so many great museums on the list and in Minnesota."
Stevens details one aspect that makes the Mill City Museum so unique.
"A flour tower is a multimedia show set on a freight elevator," explains Stevens. "The audience moves up and down throughout the building. They see what a working flour mill look like on each of the floors. The machines come back to life and they hear the voices of real workers who worked in this building."
After shuttering the city's flour mills in the middle part of the centrury, the old mills along the river sat empty and crumbling. Then a massive fire gutted the abandoned Mill City building which sits along the West Bank of the Mississippi River in downtown.
In the mid-1990s, the city of Minneapolis cleared the rubble and stabilized the charred walls with steel beams. Shortly thereafter Minnesota Historical Society announced plans to build a new museum within the ruins.
Fortunately, that decision, made to preserve what was left of the landmark mill and create a museum, lives on today. More than three decades later, the museum is a highlight of downtown Minneapolis.
"The museum is set within the National Historic Landmark Washburn A Mill, the largest flour mill in the world when it was built and kind of the the key mill in Minneapolis becoming the flour milling capital of the world," Stevens says.
Soon after Minneapolis was born on the Mississippi, the city's flour milling industry skyrocketed. Powered by the river and fed by boxcars of grain rolling in from the plains, the industry gave Minneapolis those bragging rights.
In fact, WCCO Radio itself is born from that era, being named after the Washburn Crosby Company who bankrolled the early years of the radio station. It was on WCCO that the "singing" commercial jingle was born thanks to that company's "Wheaties Quartet". Of course Washburn Crosby also lives on today as General Mills.
Mill City came in fourth in last year's voting which is done by the public. You can visit Mill City Museum's Facebook page to vote once per day until February 12.