As we rapidly approach the 250th Birthday of the United States this July, WCCO takes a looks back through the eyes of Minnesota over those same 250 years.
This month we focus on the Mill City Museum, and the crucial to Minneapolis flour milling district along the Mississippi River.
Soon after Minneapolis was born on the Mississippi's west bank, the city's flour milling industry skyrocketed. Powered by the river and fed by train after train of grain rolling in from across the northern plains, the industry gave Minneapolis bragging rights as the “Flour Milling Capital of the World.”
The historic landmark museum came about in 2003, nearly 40 years after the mill closed down and over a decade after a devastating fire in 1991, says Dave Stevens, site manager for the museum.
"On a cold February night in 1991, the abandoned mill burned in a massive blaze that gutted the historic mill," he says. "Along with its original equipment and kind of left it as a as a ruin."
According to Stevens, it was the fire that sparked the interest of civic leaders in the museum's creation in what was once the largest flour mill in the world.
"They said, 'well, let's preserve it as a ruin, let's build a new museum and office building in one half of it, we'll leave one part of it as an open air courtyard.' And that's exactly what happened."
There are many unique features to the museum including the flour tower in which guests sit in a freight elevator and go up and down through the mill.
"There's some narration, but the main things is you hear voices of real people that worked in the Washburn A Mill in the later years up until its closure in 1965," says Stevens. "So real people telling their own stories of working here."
The tour also includes movie projectors, and machines on each floor coming to life.
Part of the mill that has been left exposed after a fire gutted it in 1991.
(Audacy / Ari Bergeron)
WHAT: Mill City Museum was built within the ruins of the Washburn A Mill, the flagship mill of the Washburn-Crosby Co. (later General Mills). It was the largest and most technologically advanced flour mill in the world when it was completed in 1880.
WHERE: 704 South Second Street, Minneapolis, MN 55401
HOURS: Thursday and Friday - 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday - 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
