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Mill City: A Visual History of the Minneapolis Mill District (Minnesota)

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By looking at Minneapolis's somewhat neglected, stratified, and industrial riverfront, visitors (and even some residents) may find it difficult to believe that those stiff concrete falls started it all. But their once wildly raging waters attracted tourists, prospectors, and businessmen in droves. Before that, Native Americans thought of the falls and the now lost Spirit Island as sacred places. Later, european settlers saw opportunity cascading over the surreptitously fragile limestone and sandstone drop. Travel writers wrote of their stunning beauty and power. In the end, a collective fascination with that mere sixteen and a half feet of falling water literally fueled the development of a major metropolitan center. The city of St. Anthony sprouted on the falls' east bank in the 1830s by utilizing the churning water for saw mills and grist mills. And once the military released the west bank for public development in the 1850s, a city also started to flourish there. The two river-straddled cities joined forces in 1872 under the common name "Minneapolis". And St. Anthony Falls provided the perfect union for the already highly coupled communities. Though the falls may appear a little less than impressive today they obscure a wealth of history. "Mill City" attempts to reclaim St. Anthony Falls' right to the birthplace of Minneapolis.

The book follows a rough chronological path that starts with Father Louis Hennepin's visit to the falls in 1680 and ends with the era of the Flour Mills in the 1960s. It includes very little information on the pre-european era. The majority of the text comes from contemporaneous personal testimonies of people who visited or settled at the falls. The book quotes directly from the writings of people such as Father Louis Hennepin (he claimed that the falls rose over sixty feet - a slight miscalculation), early explorers Jonathan Carver and Stephen Long, nineteenth century travelers Elizabeth Ellet and Fredrika Bremer, Colonel Josiah Snelling, John H. Stevens (he built the first house on the falls' west bank in 1849; it was later moved to a park near Minnehaha Falls and still stands), early settlers Ann North and Emily O.G. Grey, Coopers, flour packers, and a host of other people who lived and worked at the falls. This approach gives the book an "as it happened" feel. We learn about the riverfront from the very people who lived it.

The falls and the river also proved worthwhile adversaries for early Minneapolitans. The book tells the stories of the disasterous collapse of a tunnel beneath the falls in 1869 (the falls almost disappeared) and the massive Washburn A Mill explosion of 1878. Somehow the riverfront survived despite such tragedies. But it didn't survive economics. The area pretty much dried up after Buffalo, New York became the new center of flour milling in the 1930s. Some mills remained open but the activity ceased on the riverfront until very recently. The book's final chapeter, "reclaiming the riverfront", talks about a revitalization in the 1980s that once again brought people to the falls area. Converted historical buildings became unique shopping centers. But the book doesn't mention the swift decline of this revitalization in the 1990s. Shopping malls became office buildings and the local tourist population thinned considerably. Nonetheless, the opening of the Stone Arch Bridge in 1994 (built in the 1880s) still attracts numerous walkers and sightseers. And the Mill City museum opened in 2003 and brought attention once again to Minneapolis's watery origins. But the area today remains somewhat obscure compared to other bustling parts of the city.

The book also tells other stories between the lines. In the 1820s a sawmill and a gristmill were the first buildings built on the current site of Minneapolis. Lumbering soon exploded throughout the area. But by 1930, only about a hundred years later, the lumber industry had depleted nearly all of the area's pine trees. In the process, log jams and debris choked the Mississippi river and made the falls far less visually appealing. Tourism plummetted. Following the announcement of the construction of an apron on the lip of the falls the Minneapolis Tribune printed "Now is the time for all those who wish to take a final look at old St. Anthony Falls in its natural condition." The year was 1869. Though Minneapolis boomed, its rapid acceleration came at the cost of the natural falls and the area's forests.

And of course the book is loaded with amazing photographs from all eras. Not only that, the first section contains various drawings and paintings of the falls before european settlement. These are worth the price alone.

"Mill City" offers a great introduction to Minneapolis history. It also fosters an appreciation of the importance of the riverfront area and St. Anthony falls. People who read this book can walk across the Stone Arch Bridge, gaze at the modern implements that now scatter the river, and say "it all started here."

A good read to learn more about the region and twin cities. I learned a lot and enjoyed the anecdotes. This really fills in a lot if you want to know more about the region, the mills, the falls and the people who settled and built up the area.

I realy enjoyed this book. I just finished it last night and I could not put it down once I startd. I used to work in the area and always wondered what it was like before the mills closed. The book walks through a time from the discovery of St Anthony Falls to the builing of the musesums. If you are intersted in the milling of Minneapolis or just St Anthony's history...this book is for you.