Consumer History | General Mills — The Washburn A Mill on the Falls
· 1874
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Consumer History | General Mills — The Washburn A Mill on the Falls
kevin
People treat General Mills as a packaged-food company that arrived already selling Cheerios from a suburban campus.
The first machine sat on the river.
In 1874 Cadwallader C. Washburn opened the Washburn A Mill on the west bank of Saint Anthony Falls, at what is now 704 South 2nd Street in Minneapolis.
The mill used the drop of the Mississippi to turn wheat from the northern plains into flour at a scale no American mill had reached.
On 2 May 1878 a spark in airborne flour dust leveled that first house and killed workers on the floor. Contemporary tallies put the dead at fourteen instantly, with later counts of the district dead reaching eighteen.
Washburn rebuilt. The second A Mill, designed with the Austrian engineer William de la Barre and finished in 1880, put ventilation and dust control into the plan so the same air could not collect again.
In 1877 Washburn had already joined John Crosby. The Washburn-Crosby Company made the A Mill its headquarters and later stamped Gold Medal on the bags that left this yard.
In 1928 Washburn-Crosby merged with other millers to form General Mills. Wheaties had already been launched from this line in 1924. Bisquick followed in 1931 and Cheerios in 1941, still under the company that had learned to mill on this fall.
The A Mill ground flour until 1965, then stood empty. A 1991 fire left the outer walls. The city kept them.
Mill City Museum, run by the Minnesota Historical Society, opened inside those ruins in 2003. The turbine pit is still in the courtyard. Visitors walk the ground floor where the river once turned the stones.
The S&P 500 food company still dates its milling line to this lot on the falls.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons. The view is the Washburn A Mill ruins that now hold Mill City Museum, 704 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis.
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