Beauty and Nature at the Falls

Beauty and Nature at the Falls. . , The Falls of St. Anthony are the only significant cataract on the Mississippi. Their natural beauty captured the imagination and attention of Native Americans as well as early explorers and settlers. In the summer of 1680, Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan priest, became the first European to view the Falls. His account of the experience was published in France in 1683 and made the Falls a widely-known landmark in the interior wilderness., Beginning in the 1820s, American and European tourists visited the Falls in search of picturesque beauty, sometimes crossing paths with fur traders and explorers. The pristine Falls presented a wild scene, with great chunks of rock and debris and many small islands dotting the width of the river., A brave photographer standing near the whirlpool rapids below St. Anthony Falls in 1865., The power of the Falls in 1868., Above the spray and noise, some visitors saw the great economic potential of the area. The first private investor in the waterpower resources of the Falls was Franklin Steele of Maine, who started construction of a dam on the east side in 1847. The subsequent creation of other dams, tailraces, and tunnels provided waterpower to dozens of mills and factories but also greatly changed the appearance of the cataract., Geologists as well as investors have long been fascinated with the Falls. Here, three layers of Paleozoic bedrock are exposed. The lowest, a 155-foot-thick layer of St. Peter sandstone, is covered with a thin layer of Glenwood shale. Capping the shale is an 18- to 35-foot-thick layer of Platteville limestone which terminates about one-half mile upstream of the Falls. Over time, the soft sandstone has eroded below the limestone, causing the Falls to retreat upriver and form the chasm through which the Mississippi River flows in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Only man-made aprons armoring the Falls have stopped its retreat and eventual dissolution into a series of rapids., A cross-section of the geology of St. Anthony Falls and vicinity., The Platteville limestone provided building material for many early mills and factories in St. Anthony and Minneapolis. The west side of the Mississippi provided an ideal site for canal and mill construction, since the layers of sandstone and limestone were easy to excavate and allowed construction on both sides of the canal., Engineers and Innovators, Mill owners and their engineers designed a variety of distribution systems to create a steady energy source at the Falls, powering sawmills, gristmills, and factories. The west-side distribution system was designed by Charles H. Bigelow, a West Point graduate whose previous experience was at Lawrence, Massachusetts. Taking advantage of the layered character of the bedrock on the west side of the Mississippi, Bigelow was able to site mills along both sides of a "double-loaded" canal. This design, unique in Minneapolis, contributed to the city's position as the most profitable flour producer in the industry., Flour production involved constant innovation. In the late 1860s, Minneapolis millers experimented with new milling techniques to improve the quality and yield of their product. The New Process utilized so-called high grinding and a middlings purifier to solve the problems of discoloration and gluten deficiency., With the New Process, hard spring wheat which had produced poor flour with the old low-grinding method now yielded an excellent, high-gluten product, and demand for Minneapolis flour soared., George H. Christian (1838-1918) patented the New Process machinery. After learning the technique from a French miller, he first introduced it at the Minneapolis Mill and then disseminated it throughout the region. He also studied the chilled iron mill rollers used in Hungary and brought the innovation to the owners of the Washburn A Mill., George H. Christian, circa 1890., The Washburn A Mill exploded in 1878, and, shortly thereafter, William De la Barre (1849-1936), an Austrian civil engineer, was brought to Minneapolis by Governor C.C. Washburn to promote a safety device to prevent flour dust explosions. Between 1878 and 1923, he worked for several grain mills and waterpower companies, including the Washburn Flour Mills., Hundreds of workers with horse-drawn wagons built the mills and canal., William De la Barre, circa 1878., Cross-section of Pillsbury B Mill from the Northwestern Miller, 1886., The Railroad Connection, Railroad bridges were critical to the success of the milling district. Rail connections to the mills brought grain from hundreds of miles away and distributed the finished flour to a national market., In 1878, the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad built a wooden trestle over the northern half of the main waterpower canal. Locomotives, which were too heavy for the trestle, went only as far as an earth berm located between 7th and 8th Avenues (today's Chicago Avenue). From that point, train cars were pulled along the trestle with a cable powered by a water-driven turbine. The trestle was rebuilt with iron girders in 1885 and was torn down in 1936., The rebuilt rail trestle circa 1885., In 1879, the Minneapolis Eastern Railroad built a second trestle on the river side of the flour mills, adjacent to the main tailrace canal. This trestle ran from the Palisade Mill to the head of the tailrace canal and continued north along the river, parallel to the Stone Arch Bridge. The northern half of the trestle was torn down in 1941 and the southern half in 1962. The stone pedestals that supported the bridge remain, and some of the towering ironwork trestle supports were uncovered as part of Mill Ruins Park excavations in 2000., The Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad trestle over the waterpower canal, circa 1886., The west side of the Mississippi and the Tenth Avenue, Stone Arch, and Third Avenue bridges in 1925., The Stone Arch Bridge, centerpiece of the area's rail system, was constructed in 1882-1883. Designed by Charles C. Smith for railroad magnate James J. Hill, it spanned the river in a sweeping curve– a technological feat– and joined the west bank just below the gatehouse of the headrace canal. The limestone bridge structure featured 23 arches, two of which were replaced with Warren trusses when the Upper Lock was built. The bridge carried rail traffic until 1978 and was reopened as a pedestrian and bicycle link in 1994., St. Anthony Falls, 1786, as envisioned by Alexis Jean Fournier in 1887., This view at Portland Avenue and West River Parkway in 2002 still shows the limestone ledge as well as stone quarried for building and canal construction., St. Anthony Falls and Suspension Bridge (Alexis Jean Fournier, 1885)., The west side mills with the Third Avenue Bridge in the foreground in 1925.,

The fact cannot be too distinctly impressed upon the mind of the student of the history of Minneapolis that the Falls of St. Anthony constituted the nucleus around which everything clustered and was that which caused everything to cluster there. , Edward Bromley, newspaper photographer, 1890

. , The Palisade Mill was the terminus of the waterpower canal; in 1884, the landscape included a vista of the Stone Arch Bridge and the Falls., The rail trestle on the Mississippi side of the mills, 1905.