The Most Impossible Rise of a City Ever: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis had no harbor, no gold, no coal, no oil. It had a waterfall — the only one on the Mississippi — and a fifty-foot drop of limestone over soft sandstone that was eroding from the day the first mill went up. In thirty years, that waterfall turned a frontier outpost into the flour milling capital of the world, producing more than St. Louis, Budapest, and Buffalo combined. The Washburn A Mill explosion of 1878 killed eighteen men and leveled a third of the milling district in seconds. Cadwallader Washburn rebuilt it bigger. Charles Pillsbury built his own mill to match. Gold Medal Flour won its name. The West Hotel opened with four hundred rooms and a Tiffany urn. The Metropolitan Building rose twelve stories with one of the finest interior light courts in America. And underneath all of it, the falls were quietly collapsing — a tunnel disaster in 1869 nearly destroyed them entirely, and only a buried concrete wall that nobody has inspected since holds them in place today. Then came Wilbur Foshay's tower, Sousa's bounced check, the urban renewal that erased the old downtown, and the skyway system that saved winter commerce and emptied the streets. This is the story of a city that engineered its way past every reason it shouldn't exist. Sources Minnesota Historical Society, "Minneapolis Flour Milling Boom," Mill City Museum collections (mnhs.org/millcity) Iric Nathanson, "Looking back at the 1878 Washburn A Mill explosion," MinnPost, June 6, 2013 Molly Huber, "St. Anthony Falls Tunnel Collapse, October 5, 1869," MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society Steve Brandt, "Historical, hidden wall protecting St. Anthony Falls draws new scrutiny," Star Tribune, August 14, 2021 Larry Millett, AIA Guide to the Twin Cities (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007) Dennis Gardner, Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office, interview with FOX 9 on Foshay Tower history, August 30, 2019