Year.St. Paul.Minneapolis.St. Anthony.
18501,083....538
186010,4012,5643,285
187020,03013,0665,013
188041,47346,887....
1890133,156164,738....
1900163,632202,781....

The falls was the point at which the early thought and life of Minneapolis centred, and the foundation of its early business prosperity. Paul Bourget, in his Outre Mer, speaking of the reasons for the location of American cities, says, "If any feature such as a waterfall permitted factories, industries were established. Minneapolis had no other origin. The falls of the Mississippi lent themselves to a series of incomparable mills and this was the starting-point of one of the future capitals of the world." When the Government established a fort it took the name of the falls, and the first town-sites were only distinguishable from each other by the difference between St. Anthony and St. Anthony City.

[FALLS OF ST. ANTHONY, DURING HIGH WATER.]

When it was rumored that the waterpower was about to be destroyed, consternation rested upon the little community. In 1868 the historian Parkman had written:

"Great changes, however, have taken place here and are still in progress. The rock is a very soft and friable sandstone, overlaid by a stratum of limestone; and it is crumbling with such rapidity under the action of the water that the cataract will soon be little more than a rapid.[13] Other changes equally disastrous in the artistic point of view are going on even more quickly. Beside the falls stands a city which by an ingenious combination of Greek and Sioux languages received the name of Minneapolis, the City of the Water, and which in 1867 contained ten thousand inhabitants, two national banks, and an opera house, while its rival city of St. Anthony, immediately opposite, boasts a gigantic water cure and the State University. In short, the great natural beauty of the place is utterly spoiled."

Minneapolis is essentially a manufacturing city. For many years the principal industry was the manufacture of lumber, which in its various forms has now reached great magnitude. The annual output for the five years prior to 1850 was 1,500,000 feet a year. In 1870 it reached 118,500,000 feet a year; in 1880 it was 195,500,000; in 1890, 300,000,000; in 1900 more than 500,000,000, and in addition 57,000,000 shingles and 94,000,000 laths. An army of men is engaged in the work of cutting the logs on the timber lands of the north. These are driven or floated down the river to the booms near the mills which line the river in the northern part of the city.

[THE MILLING DISTRICT.]

The prominence of the city in flour-milling is due to its location and to the skill and ingenuity of the men who have been engaged in the business. Minneapolis has passed through three well-defined milling periods. Prior to 1870 the ancient process of grinding wheat between the upper and nether millstones was in use, which turned into middlings much of the precious gluten. In 1872 an emigrant French miller named Legroux devised an apparatus for purifying middlings, and as a result the product became famous as "Minnesota Patent Flour," and brought pre-eminence and wealth to the Minnesota millers. A practical monopoly existed until the Eastern millers discovered that the process could be as well applied to the winter wheat of Minnesota as to the spring. Then began a new struggle for pre-eminence. After searching through the world, the Minneapolis millers discovered in Hungary a process of milling hard wheat which finally disposed of the ancient millstone and carried the wheat between rolls of smooth and corrugated surface until, by a process of gradual reduction, the desired fineness was secured. Foremost in the work of developing this great industry was the late Charles A. Pillsbury, to whose enterprise the city is greatly indebted.

At the present time the Minneapolis mills can produce 76,366 barrels of flour a day, which is the largest daily capacity of any group of mills in the world. The flour export for 1900 was 4,702,485 barrels. Thus the mills of Minneapolis, if grinding steadily, could give a loaf of bread every day to every man, woman, and child in the States of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

[PUBLIC LIBRARY, MINNEAPOLIS.]