History on Display: Mill City Museum
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
In which I announce that The Dragon From Chicago is out in paperback, and then wander off topic
For historical reasons related to the business of publishing that I do not entirely understand, new (traditionally published) books almost always release on Tuesdays—that’s why my Q & A’s with other authors about their new books almost always run on a Tuesday. Today it’s my turn. The paperback edition of The Dragon from Chicago is now out in the world, and I couldn’t be more happy.
I wish I could claim that I took the way news books are released into account when I decided that my blog posts would appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.[1] But I wasn’t looking that far ahead. I’m not even sure I knew that books release on Tuesdays when I started History in the Margins back in May, 2011. I certainly didn’t understand the relationship between writing a blog and writing a book.
I calculate that over the last fourteen years and a bit I’ve written roughly 1350 posts. (Yikes!) At an average of 500 words a post, those posts add up to the jaw-dropping equivalent of eight medium-sized books.
[pauses to check math.] [checks math a second time] [Yikes!]
In theory, I could have used that time to write another book or two—or take tap-dancing classes, or learn another language, or read my way through the hundreds of books on my To-Be-Read shelves[2] or take a trip with My Own True Love. But the fact of the matter is that the blog feeds the books in important ways. Blog posts keep my writing muscles strong and limber. They give me a place to explore ideas. To grapple with bits of history, large[3] and small, that I need to understand to write the current book project.[4] To share the cool stories I stumble across that don’t belong in the book at all, but add texture to my understanding of a period.
Writing History in the Margins is also a way to stay in touch with all of you. Thanks for being along for the ride.
[1] Unless my schedule blows up on me. As it did last week. I try to have one or two posts in the pipeline and scheduled to go live. And in fact, I do have two posts in the pipeline. Both of which will run on Tuesdays in September to coincide with the publication of other writer’s books. Unfortunately, that did not help me when Friday’s post squirmed in my hands like a cat that doesn’t want to be held. But I digress.
[2] And piled on my study floor
[3] I wrote a five-part series back in the early months of working on The Dragon from Chicago in which I tried to wrap my head around the Weimar Republic. There’s no easy way to give you a link to the series, but you can find them in June and July, 2020.
[4] Just for the record, I do not have a current book project yet.
* * * *
It’s taken me fourteen plus years, but I finally figured out how to produce real footnotes on the blog. Next challenge: Can I make it work on the newsletter?
Road Trip Through History: Historic Fort Snelling
For anyone who missed the memo, My Own True Love and I spent last week in the Twin Cities, finishing up the last bit of our multi-year exploration of the Great River Road. It was wonderful. We enjoyed lots of history-nerdery, learned some amazing stories,(1) and danced to a local Cajun band(2)—a perfect way to link the two ends of the Great River Road on our final visit.
Painting of Fort Snelling by Col. Seth Eastman, ca. 1830
We spent our first day in Minnesota at Historic Fort Snelling, the place where the Twin Cities began. Fort Snelling was built between 1818 and 1825, as a frontier fort with the purpose of protecting American interests in the fur trade. It was in active use through 1946, with a brief pause between 1858, when Minnesota became a state and it was presumed that a frontier fort was no longer needed, and the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, an important event in Minnesota history which neither I nor My Own True Love had heard of. (3) Over the years, new buildings were erected and old buildings torn down. At the time the fort was decommissioned, only four of its original buildings were standing. Today, the fort has been reconstructed to its original 1825 appearance, with the help of extensive archeological research. (Both the reconstruction and the excavations continue.) The buildings house exhibits that include life in the fort, medical knowledge at the time, and archeological exhibits. Staff members are available to answer questions. (I was particularly interested by the representation of how soldiers’ lives and equipment varied from period to period.) Living history exhibitions occur. In short, it resembled many other historic American forts that we have visited, and enjoyed, over the years. (4)
But the fort itself is only part of the story told at the site, an experience summed up in the title of the excellent exhibit in the site’s new visitor center: “Many Voices, Many Stories, One Place.” The on-site interpreters and museum designers take that title seriously.
The main focus on other voices is the Native American presence. Both the brief introductory tour of the fort and the interpretive exhibit begin the story not with the decision to build a fort at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, but with the importance of that location as a sacred place for the Dakota. Exhibits discussed Dakota and Ojibwe culture in the area, the United States’ repeated failure to honor the treaties made with those peoples, and the U.S. Dakota War of 1862.
Historic Fort Snelling also takes care to include the stories of African-Americans and women who were at the fort. Those stories are more than a performative aside. They provided a deeper picture of life at the fort. For example, even though slavery was illegal in Minnesota, Army officers brought enslaved people with them as servants. Two of those servants made history: Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, used their years in the free territory of Minnesota as the legal basis when they unsuccessfully sued their owner for their freedom. The landmark case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional—right up there in the list of really bad Supreme Court decisions. The course of the case increased tensions between north and south and brought the United States one step closer to civil war. (5) Two months after the decision, a subsequent owner of the pair emancipated them.
In short, an excellent start to our visit to the Twin Cities.
More stories coming in future posts. Don’t touch that dial!
(1)Don’t worry. I plan to share
(2) What? You don’t associate Cajun music with Minnesota? In fact, local musicians have been playing Cajun music in the Twin Cities and dancers have been waltzing and two-stepping to it since the 1970s.
(3) It is humbling how often I discover big gaps in my knowledge about our own history, let alone that of other places. I hope to fill a few gaps when I read my way through Native American heritage month in November. I own a lot of unread books on the subject . I have a list of others I want to read. I hope to make a small dent in both the To-Be-Read pile and my own ignorance.
(4) For example: Old Fort Madison, Fort Robinson, Fort Sumter, …
(5) It is telling that we know this only as the Dred Scott case. I’m not sure I even knew that he had a wife, let alone that she was part of the legal action. I certainly didn’t know her name. Moreover, the Scotts were not the only enslaved people who used their time at Fort Snelling to claim their freedom. Two enslaved women, known only as Rachel and Courtney, successfully sued for their freedom based on their time in Minnesota. I don’t think they showed up in my textbooks at all. Perhaps because they won.