Run of the Mill

Feels like the base of my skull could just about touch my shoulder blades, I’m craning my neck so hard. Still I can barely make out the terra cotta sculptures high atop the new Washburn Lofts on the recently hoity-toitified Minneapolis riverfront. There are three millers 11 stories up, an homage in stone to the industry that earned Minneapolis its title as the world’s flour superpower from 1885 to the mid-1930s. Created by Minneapolis sculptor John Karl Daniels—better known for his ominous bronze statue of Leif Erickson on the Capitol grounds—the works depict the history of flour milling. The industrial equivalent of Darwin’s march from primordial ooze to proper man, the figures advance from a half-naked brute squatting over a mortar and pestle to a vaguely Dickensian worker, his hair neatly parted, as he crouches over an updated version of the same tools, to a fully erect modern miller, standing tall in a peaked cap and trim jacket as he casually oversees a milling machine. While it’s difficult to see from this distance, the machine could be a “middlings purifier,” a device introduced here around the turn of the century to sift husks from wheat, leaving the pure white flour heralded worldwide for its Gold Medal quality.

Carved by Daniels at half size and enlarged to eight feet in height by a commercial reproduction firm, these regionalist idealizations of the working man are fitting ornamentation for this 1914 landmark. In the first half of the 20th century, employees of the Washburn Crosby Company (a precursor to General Mills) packaged flour here. They tested recipes in the original Betty Crocker kitchens and broadcast the “Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air” on WCCO radio (whose call letters came from the mill’s name). Most chilling about the works is their accidental accuracy. Like so many flesh-and-blood workers of Mill City’s heyday, the central figure has lost an arm. This industry of pulleys and water wheels, flour-dust explosions, and churning gears propelled Minneapolis to the top of another less lauded industry—production of prosthetic limbs. While someone living in one of these million-dollar lofts today would have to make about $170 per hour, its first tenants made about $6 a week—and sometimes paid an arm and a leg for the privilege.