Dakota people call it Owámniyomni. For centuries, they envisioned the Mississippi River’s largest waterfall as a sacred place. The fifty-foot drop harbors an intense spiritual energy. In the 1820s, the arrival of the United States government—in the guise of white soldiers—gave rise to a new understanding of the falls they called St. Anthony. New Englanders, in particular, recognized the kinetic possibilities of falling water. Just as their parents converted the rocky rivers of Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire into sources of industrial power, these men saw immense mechanical potential at St. Anthony Falls. With it, they envisioned processing raw materials into saleable goods and building a great city.
Settlers soon transformed the river’s energy into power. Disputes over water rights defined early efforts to harness it. Constructing millraces and canals in the soft sandstone substrate proved easy, but dangerous. A bungled 1869 attempt to harness more energy almost destroyed St. Anthony Falls. Only federal intervention preserved the falls and the future of the new city of Minneapolis. That intervention ensured the consolidation of control over the river’s energy. Thereafter, a complex system of canals and millraces spread power generation beyond the falls’ immediate proximity.
Initially, that power made lumber from timber. Quickly exhausting nearby forests, millers soon turned to flour milling. But milling technology demanded soft wheat strains that could not be grown on the converted grasslands that made up Minneapolis’s Northern Plains hinterland. The climate limited cultivation to hard wheats. Separating the bran and germ from the carbohydrate-rich endosperm of hard wheats required new machines. Millers used espionage to develop novel technologies. Detaching starches from the rest of the kernel in recalcitrant hard wheats also produced a higher gluten content flour that resulted in better bread. Most importantly, the emergent mills in Minneapolis—which eventually grew to become large food corporations such as Pillsbury, General Mills, and Cargill—helped create nutrition capitalism, a political economy that defines the way we understand, make, and eat food, and even today animates food production and consumption in the United States.
In the mills themselves, water-driven turbines elevated wheat kernels to multi-story heights. Gravity and moving air provided further kinetic energy. The kernels fell back to ground level through separators and chutes that used moving air to separate milled grain fragments. Finally, fruits of the field and finished flours alike found their way to and from St. Anthony Falls via coal-powered railroads.
Together, these manipulated energies made the calories embodied in wheat kernels accessible to millions. Born of sun and soil as well as human, mechanical, and animal labor, wheat seeds provided power for people only after careful processing. Separating the bran and germ from the endosperm with never-before-seen efficiency at a never-before-seen scale, the white flour produced at St. Anthony Falls provided the world’s first industrially-produced grain-based carbohydrates. Milled locally for centuries, flour made at an industrial scale required cheap energy, an expansive agricultural hinterland, large numbers of wage workers, a grain variety matched to milling technology, large factories, and integration into transportation networks. By the 1880s, Minneapolis sported all six.