Guided Walking Tours of the Minneapolis Riverfront Begin – Minneapolis, MN

Guided Walking Tours of the Minneapolis Riverfront Begin – Minneapolis, MN

by | Jul 13, 2024 | events/locations

Historic Riverfront Walking Tours
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Walk the Minneapolis riverfront and learn about its dramatic past.

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On this tour, participants will visit the historic district at St. Anthony Falls, which was once the milling center of the world and is now a growing cultural, recreational, and residential neighborhood.

Your guide will share stories of the people who have lived and worked along the riverfront and how it has changed over the years. Participants will see how the neighborhood has evolved over the years, and will learn about the riverfront renaissance over the last forty years through historic preservation and new development.

Highlights of the outdoor tour include the National Historic Engineering Landmark Stone Arch Bridge, and St. Anthony Falls, the only significant waterfall on the Mississippi River.

With appreciation to the Bill and Kay McReavy and Family Fund for Programming in Connection with Tours on the Stone Arch Bridge.

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August 19, 2017, Saturday - Riverfront Quest Family Walking Tour at Mill City Museum - Mill District Events - Minneapolis Riverfront Neighborhoods.

Mill City Museum

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Events

Historic Riverfront Walking Tours
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Sunday, July 14th
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
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Sunday, August 11th
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
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Sunday, September 8th
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
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Location

Mill City Museum

704 South 2nd Street

 Minneapolis, MN

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Minnesota Travel Guide 2024 (Tour guide)

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ICYMI

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Washburn A Mill Tour – Minneapolis, MN

Washburn A Mill Tour – Minneapolis, MN

by | Jun 4, 2023 | art/design

Washburn A Mill Tour

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Explore the nooks and crannies of the Washburn A Mill, the National Historic Landmark that is the home of Mill City Museum.

The tour highlights the lives of men and women who worked there, how the building functioned during its peak flour milling years, how it changed over time, and how the mill ruin was converted to a museum and office building.

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Hear Her Stories: A Celebration of Women’s History Month – Minneapolis, MN

Hear Her Stories: A Celebration of Women’s History Month – Minneapolis, MN

by | Mar 12, 2023 | people/passions

Join Mill City Museum and Story Arts of Minnesota for an evening of storytelling in recognition of Women’s History Month.

Hear true stories–funny, poignant and inspiring–from contemporary women inspired by history and women of the past.

Hosted by local performer, Jen Scott.

Reserve Tickets

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Event

Hear Her Stories: A Celebration of Women’s History Month

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Date

Friday, March 24th, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
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Reserve

Pre-sale tickets are sliding scale; Day-of door price is $15/members save 20%
Doors open at 6:30 pm, program beings at 7 pm.

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Location

704 South 2nd Street
Minneapolis, MN

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ICYMI

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Minnesota Historical Society: Mill City Museum – Minneapolis, MN

Minnesota Historical Society: Mill City Museum – Minneapolis, MN

by | Jun 19, 2022 | art/design, evergreen

The Minnesota Historical Society opened Mill City Museum in 2003.

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Mill City Museum was built within the ruins of the Washburn A Mill, the flagship mill of the Washburn-Crosby Co. (later General Mills). It was the largest and most technologically advanced flour mill in the world when it was completed in 1880.

Millers at the Washburn mills in the 1870s perfected a new process for milling, a revolution that made fine wheat flour available to the masses for the first time. Soon thereafter Minneapolis became the flour milling capital of the world, a title it held from 1880 to 1930.

Plan Your Visit

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Architecture and Art

Mill City Museum is an architectural showpiece, rising eight stories within the limestone ruins of the Washburn A Mill — a National Historic Landmark and once the largest flour mill in the world.

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Architecture

The Washburn A Mill was designed in the late 1800s by Austrian engineer William de la Barre. After its completion in 1880, it was declared the world’s largest flour mill. It operated for 85 years, expanding into a complex of over a dozen buildings and surviving a 1928 fire. The mill shut down in 1965, and the abandoned mill was gutted by another fire in 1991.

In the mid 1990s the city of Minneapolis cleaned up the rubble and stabilized the mill’s charred walls. Shortly thereafter the Minnesota Historical Society announced its intention to construct a milling museum and education center within the ruins.

Faced with how to preserve the ruins of this historically significant site while building a modern museum, MNHS turned to Thomas Meyer, principal of Minneapolis architectural firm Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd. (MSR). Meyer developed a concept that melded the historic integrity of the mill structures with modern components. Construction began in March 2001, and the museum opened to the public in September 2003.

Meyer’s design left intact many features of the original mill, including flour bins, milling machinery, the engine house, rail corridor, and a wheat house. A glass curtain wall facing the Ruin Courtyard has etchings from an 1898 building cross section showing the location of the milling machinery. With multiple entries on two levels, the museum functions as a porous link between downtown Minneapolis and the Mississippi River.

Mill City Museum has won numerous awards, including the AIA Honor Award for Architecture, AIA Minnesota Honor Award.

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Art

Woven throughout Mill City Museum and its exhibits are unique works by the local and regional artists:

 

Two large colored glass art installations crossed with steel.

Between Now and Then, Minnesota

JoAnn Verburg, St. Paul, Minnesota

St. Anthony Falls, long considered a sacred place, is a the only waterfall on the Mississippi River. The Twin Cities were created here as the result of a great collage of forces: the spiritual regard for this location on the part of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, the power and energy of falling water, the strength and intelligence of immigrants, new possibilities of movement via the railroad, discoveries in the technology of milling, innovations in growing wheat, giant expanses of open fields, and long summer days of sunshine. This collage is made of glass, photographs, steel, and cement, and measures 14 feet tall by 25 feet wide. As you view this artwork, you stand where trains used to pass through the building. This artwork invites you to look out through images of wheat, water, tree, and sky, and from this sacred and historic location, contemplate the ever-changing present we are creating together.

 

Backdrop showing field of wheat and sky.

Panoramic image of a wheat field and sky

Tom Maakestad, Marine-on-St Croix, Minnesota

Landscape artist Tom Maakestad painted this image to serve as the backdrop for a late-19th-century traction engine, a major fixture in the Harvesting Wheat exhibit. Maakestad’s original artwork was reproduced on a larger scale (10 feet by 20 feet) to create a context for the traction engine and suggest the vastness of the wheat-growing fields in Minnesota.

 

A large-scale model of a Bisquick box with a stack of model pancakes.

Bisquick box and pancakes

Kim Lawler, St. Paul, Minnesota

For the Promoting Mill Products exhibit, scenic painter and muralist Kim Lawler produced a 15-foot, freestanding Bisquick Box with an image of the packaging as seen in 1931 on one side and 1981 on the opposite side. Visitors are invited to step inside the box to experience signature advertising campaigns from the past and present through TV and radio commercials. Lawler also produced a 6-foot-wide stack of pancakes for a hands-on activity area where children are encouraged to design their own mill product packaging.

 

Wheat emporium sculpture with four large columns inscribed with text.

Wheat Emporium

Kim Lawler, St. Paul, Minnesota

Lawler designed a three-columned, freestanding structure for the Wheat Emporium, an exhibit that explores how wheat imagery has been used as a potent symbol throughout the ages. Each column is actually a case that displays everyday objects, such as paintings, currency, clothing, and dishware that incorporate wheat as a decorative motif.

 

Wood carving of man standing.

Wood sculptures

Paul Wrench and Becky Schurmann, Minneapolis

Husband-and-wife team Paul Wrench and Becky Schurmann brought characters introduced throughout Mill City Museum to life. The 13 figures were hand-carved from salvaged white pine from Humboldt Mill, a neighboring mill of the Washburn A Mill. Each sculpture has been stained and finished, and represents an individual who played a role in the flour milling story. The sculptures include William de la Barre, the Austrian engineer who designed Washburn A Mill; Jean Spielman, a labor organizer; Mary Dodge Woodward, a cook on a bonanza wheat farm; and boxcar loaders and female flour packers.

 

History

Soon after Minneapolis was born on the Mississippi’s west bank, the city’s flour milling industry skyrocketed. Powered by the mighty river and fed by boxcars of grain rolling in from the plains, the industry gave Minneapolis bragging rights as the “Flour Milling Capital of the World.”

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ICYMI

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