My Own True Love and I spent the third day of our time in the Twin Cities at the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, which had been on our “must-visit” list ever since we decided to skip over the Twin Cities as we drove along the Great River Road from Minnesota into Iowa in 2018.[1]

Built in the ruins of what was once the world’s largest flour mill, Mill City Museum uses many smaller stories to tell two larger stories. The first was the development of Minneapolis around St. Anthony’s Falls, which is the only major waterfall on the Mississippi and provided power for two industrial booms, lumber and flour. The second was the history of the flour industry itself, which boomed in Minneapolis between 1866, when C.C. Washburn, the founder of what became Gold Medal Flour, built his first flour mill in Minneapolis, and 1930, when Buffalo, New York, replaced Minneapolis as the center of flour milling the United States.

The museum includes a multimedia presentation, staged in a gutted flour tower, that uses vintage photos and films and recorded interviews with former mill workers to to bring to life what it was like to work in the flour mill. There are also “lab” spaces devoted to the two major elements that are part of the museum. I skipped out on the Water Lab, a hands-on demonstration of how water works to generate power—the chlorine smell was a little too much for me. I found the smells in the Baking Lab much more appealing. The only hands-on experience was a sample of a freshly baked loaf of bread, but I was fascinated by a technical discussion of different flours.[2]

Here are a few of the stories that caught my imagination:

•  The so-called “mill girls” worked on a separate floor from the men and had their own break room, where they played the piano, played cards, and occasionally danced. Their primary job was filling smaller flour sacks for home consumption, but occasionally they also sewed flour sacks, and their own neat uniforms and caps. If the exhibited pages from the in-house magazine are to be believed, people were also interested in the mill girls at the time.
• Brands of flour were first created at the end of the nineteenth century, alongside the growth of the milling industry. Before that, you bought whatever flour the general store or grocer had in the flour barrel. (Or, earlier yet, took your own grain to the local mill to be ground.)
• I already knew that, unlike Oscar Mayer, Betty Crocker was not a real person. I did not realize that she was created in 1921, when the Washburn-Crosby company ran a contest in the Saturday Evening Post.  Unexpectedly,  the marketing department received baking questions along with contest entries. The department wanted to answer the questions—talk about a way to build brand loyalty!— but wanted those answers to come from a woman. Betty Crocker was born.
  • Bisquick was created when a tired flour executive enjoyed hot biscuits as part of a restaurant meal. When he asked how the cook did it, he learned the cook kept a mix ready to go in the kitchen cooler so he could make hot biscuits on demand. The test kitchens were put to work to develop a product that would allow home cooks to do the same thing. And then to figure out other things the resulting product could be used for.[3]

The museum website suggests you give yourself two hours to go through the museum. We were there five hours. A resounding four thumbs up.

[1] We spent much of our second day actually driving the Great River Road through the Twin Cities. We enjoyed it a lot, though it didn’t produce much in the way of history nerd stories. We ended the day with a couple of hours at the Minnesota History Center. One child-friendly exhibit on Minnesota history in general. One more specific on the “greatest generation” in Minnesota, from their childhoods through the boom years after WWII. Both excellent.
[2] I was there at the same time as another curious cook. Since we were only guests at the time, the conversation went way off script, but the staff member was more than able to answer our questions.
[3] Disclaimer: This is not a product endorsement