The expansion of grain-growing regions, the development of a rail network, and the building of storage facilities in the Gilded Age made possible the development of large-scale, year-round flour milling, but a process was needed to mill the hard spring wheat grown on the northern prairies. Cadwallader Colden Washburn, a Minneapolis flour miller, solved that problem in 1879 by utilizing technologies developed in Hungary (where rollers rather than millstones were used to break the hard wheat) and France (where purifiers with air blowers separated unwanted hulls, bran, and germ from the flour). Washburn also designed a mill that derived maximum efficiency from this machinery to produce flour rapidly and cheaply.
Washburn shared the technology of the “new process” mill with the Pillsbury brothers and other Minneapolis millers, and that city soon dominated the industry. By 1882 Minneapolis had replaced St. Louis as the nation’s milling center. It produced 3 million bushels of flour annually, or one-twenty-third of the nation’s entire output. In that decade the Pillsburys were the city’s largest flour producers. In addition, they developed a nutritious, profitable cattle feed from the “refuse” hulls, bran, and germ that had previously been dumped in the Mississippi River. By 1890 Minneapolis milled more than 7 million bushels, or one-twelfth of all the flour milled in the United States, and by approximately 1900 it had overtaken Budapest as the world’s leading flour-milling city. The huge volume of flour shipments out of Minneapolis and competing railroads enabled millers there to secure rebates and gain a larger share of the market. Indeed, discriminatory freight rates favoring Minneapolis flour ruined New York millers and led to demands in that state for railroad regulation.
Further reading: John Storck and Walter Dorwin Teague, Flour for Man’s Bread: A History of Milling (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952).
World History
