Historical recollection

Minneapolis gets a new milling museum

University adjunct professor and alum Tom Meyer stands on the Stone Arch Bridge, with the Mill City Museum he designed in the background.

Photo by Tom Foley

by Martha Coventry

From M, fall 2003

As an architecture student at the University of Minnesota in the early 1970s, Tom Meyer often went with friends to the once bustling but now abandoned St. Anthony Falls milling district just upstream from the University. "We had the place to ourselves--the bridges, the waterfalls, the buildings," says Meyer. "It was a fabulous playground." When it was time to do a thesis project for his architecture degree, Meyer chose to design an imaginary Museum of St. Anthony Falls.

Thirty years later, Meyer got the unexpected opportunity to revive the spirit of his old plans. The Minnesota Historical Society hired Meyer, now a University adjunct associate professor and principal in the architecture firm of Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, to create its new Mill City Museum. It opened September 13, 2003, built amidst the ruins of the Washburn Crosby 'A' Mill.

Mill City, USA

During its most productive years from 1880 to 1930, Minneapolis's flour milling district was a wheat-driven Silicon Valley, bringing the city into the modern age, increasing its population more than tenfold, spurring technological innovations, and giving rise to General Mills, Pillsbury, and Cargill.

Powered by St. Anthony Falls, the only real waterfall on the entire length of the Mississippi, 20 stone flour mills lined the river. But when the Washburn Crosby 'A' Mill opened in 1874 on the river's west bank, it was the biggest and best in the world. Each day, 175 boxcars of hard spring wheat from the northern plains were unloaded and employees turned out enough flour to make 12 million loaves of bread.

But the district floundered after World War I due to new regulations on Canadian wheat, changes in American baking habits, and the decentralization of flour milling. The Washburn Crosby 'A' Mill closed for good in 1965.

After graduation in 1972, Meyer and another young architect set up an office in the huge old building, still in mint condition circa 1900, and still filled with its original wooden machinery. At lunch time, Meyer would wander through the deserted mill and eat his sandwich overlooking the river in the silence of what felt like an empty city.

Meyer's career went on to flourish, and he moved his office to the warehouse district. In 1991, the Washburn Crosby 'A' Mill--now a National Historic Landmark--and all its contents burned in a massive fire. Meyer and others encouraged the city to preserve the burnt-out shell and stabilize it. When given the opportunity to design a museum 10 years later, Meyer's challenge was to build something new within the shell of something old without destroying the essential quality of the mill ruins.

A place for discovery

The Mill City Museum building faces 2nd Street S., two streets up from the river and a stone's throw from where the new Guthrie Theater will be built (they will be linked by a bricked courtyard). Meyer's eight-story structure nestles inside the front half of the mill's ruined shell, using parts of the old walls for the sides of the new building. A glass atrium opens up the entire back wall of the museum to the river and to the jagged stone walls, twisted girders, and broken out windows of the original structure. The effect is striking. Meyer's design shows a respect for the value of ruins rarely seen in this country. The remains of the old mill are not just a backdrop for the new museum, but are part of it and powerfully beautiful in themselves.

By paying homage to the original structure--around every corner of the new museum you find a glimpse, a relic, a seemingly forgotten patch of the abandoned mill, even graffiti--Meyer also retained what he loved about the building as a young man. "I wanted to keep it as a place for discovery," he says, "and not gentrify it so completely that the explorability is spoiled. There's not a lot of fussiness in the design. Things were left pretty much as they were whenever possible." As a result, the entire place is one big exhibit.

Of course, there are specific, and often interactive, exhibits to tell the history of milling and wheat farming and the stories that make the past come alive. And the museum's large and inviting spaces are designed to accommodate the 30,000 school children expected each year. An eight-story elevator ride--the "Flour Tower"--stops at each floor, opening to one scene after another of life at the mill. At the end of the ride is the rooftop terrace with its wide, stunning view of the river, the Stone Arch Bridge, Mill Ruins Park--an ongoing restoration of the milling district--and the surprising number of grain elevators still dotting the Minneapolis and St. Paul landscape.

Tom Meyer is now back where he started--in the Washburn Crosby 'A' Mill. The Meyer, Scherer, & Rockcastle offices are on the top two floors of the Mill City Museum building, and from his drafting table, Meyer can look out over the ruined mill walls to the playground of his undergraduate days.