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I wouldn't have thought you could devote an entire museum to flour. But Mill City Museum in Minneapolis does it well.
With plenty of hands-on activities, it also is one of those rare museums that truly has appeal for all ages. My toddler splashed in the water lab. My kindergartener designed a cereal box. And I learned fascinating bits of history. Did you know Minneapolis was once the flour capital of the world?
The 5-year-old museum is devoted to the history and technology of Minnesota's milling industry and is housed within the ruins of the Washburn A Mill, built in 1881 by Cadwallader C. Washburn.
If you've been in downtown Minneapolis, you've seen it. It's the building topped with the Gold Medal Flour sign. It was the most technologically advanced and largest mill in the world, until the Pillsbury family built an even larger mill across the river the following year.
Visitors enter through a nondescript door on Second Street into a lobby lined with the mill's original masonry. A glass wall several stories high looks out onto a ruined courtyard, and beyond that, the broken exterior wall of the old mill. Through the old wall's crumbling window openings you see glimpses of the Mississippi River.
The river is the reason the mills were built here in the first place. St. Anthony Falls provided convenient and cheap power.
"There were a lot of other factors that contributed to the growth of flour milling," says museum manager Laura Salveson.
The new
The Washburn A Mill is actually the second mill built in this location. The first was destroyed in a flour explosion in 1878. We saw a demonstration of a flour dust explosion using a small model of a grain elevator Cargill once used in employee safety presentations.
A museum interpreter put a teaspoon of flour into a chamber, zapped it with an electric spark and pumped in air with a bicycle pump. To the astonishment and delight of my 5-year-old, the explosion caused a loud boom, blew the metal lid off and ignited a piece of paper.
And that was just a teaspoon of flour. The 1878 explosion leveled the building and killed everyone inside. When Washburn rebuilt, he tried to reduce the risk of another explosion by installing dust collectors, some of which can be seen still in place on the eighth floor of the museum.
We learned more history on the Flour Tower, an ingenious eight-story elevator that takes visitors to different scenes while voices of mill workers talk about what it was like to work at the mill. (A word of warning: There is another explosion on the ride, complete with alarm sound effects and flickering lights. My toddler survived because I knew it was coming and put my hands over her ears.)
By the end of the ride, the kids were tired of sitting still, so we opted to skip the film "Minneapolis in 19 Minutes Flat," written by local humorist Kevin Kling.
Instead, we hit the main exhibit hall. When we walked through the baking lab, a staff member was seasoning croutons and urged us to take samples of sweet rolls.
We also saw a huge table set with food a farm wife might have fed her threshing crew, watched commercials featuring Betty Crocker and designed our own cereal boxes on felt boards.
We spent nearly 45 minutes in the water lab, a separate room with three large water tables. My 5-year-old built dams and diverted water to spin water wheels and turbines. We learned a V-shaped dam in the Mississippi River diverted the main current above St. Anthony Falls to either side, where it dropped into pits and turned the turbines that powered the lumber and flour mills.
At another table, my toddler used a stick to push "logs" downstream into the sawmills.
At the third table, my son assembled a three-dimensional model of the Minneapolis milling district 100 years ago, when more than two dozen mills lined the west bank of St. Anthony Falls.
"It's probably the most kid-friendly museum I've seen," said John Paul, who was visiting from South Dakota with his wife and two boys.
His sons - Iver, 6, and Everett, 5 - were loading tiny sacks of wheat and flour onto trucks and trains in a kid-sized diorama that took up half a wall. The boys may not have realized it, but they were learning about the supply and distribution chain when they unloaded flour sacks onto barges.
The Washburn A Mill closed in 1965. General Mills, which had bought out Washburn's company, was moving out of commercial flour into production of cereals and other processed products. Flour milling in general had declined in the area, in part, because of tariff changes, higher freight rates and a decrease in consumer demand.
The last mill on St. Anthony Falls closed in 2003, the same year the museum opened.
Maja Beckstrom can be reached at mbeckstrom@pioneerpress. com or 651-228-5295.
FAMILY OUTINGS: THE SCOOP
What: Mill City Museum
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (open until 9 p.m. Thursdays); noon to 5 p.m. Sundays
Where: 704 S. Second St., Minneapolis
Cost: $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and college students, $4 for children ages 6-17, free for children 5 and younger
Information: 612-341-7555 or www.millcitymuseum.org
Target audience: History buffs of all ages
Crowd pleaser: Water lab
Avoid: Scaring young kids. Prepare them for the explosion in the Flour Tower.
Tip: Stop in the museum gift shop.
Special event: The museum hosts special baking demonstrations, story times and other events, including in-depth tour into the nooks and crannies of the old Washburn A Mill at 1 p.m. next Saturday and Feb. 16. Cost is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and college students, $6 for children ages 6-17. For reservations, call 612-341-7555
