“Not one stone was left upon another.”
Hehe. That’s a polite way of saying it.
They named his building “Washburn’s Folly” in 1866.
It was “too big.” No one would buy that much flour.
Then the flour market exploded.
Just 10 years later his mill was “justly, the pride of Minneapolis.”
Central Minnesota wore a necklace of boxcars
streaming for Chicago, Omaha and New York.
Two million pounds of flour every day
were streaking the pounded rails.
Minneapolis was “Mill City.”
Minneapolis was on the map.
Then the flour mill exploded.
It was 1878. May. The 2nd.
The sun was honey-dipped
and sticking gold on the windows.
The day shifters would be home by now
finding their chairs heaving a dusty sigh.
The mill inhaled welcoming the night crew
breathing flour and sweat.
The millstone ran dry,
sparking tongues forked
into the hanging flour fog.
The building breathed fire and brass
licking the sun and lighting the sky.
The first floor traded places with the seventh floor.
“Smoke in dense volumes leaped
hundreds of feet heavenward.
The word went from lip to lip
almost with the rapidity of lightning.
The Washburn mill had exploded and was destroyed.
It was a night of horror in Minneapolis.”
— St. Paul Globe, May 4, 1878
14 millers working for Washburn-Crosby
that night died without flinching.
The flames burned out
five neighboring mills.
One third of America’s flour milling capacity
disappeared in whispering smoke overnight.
Cadwallader Washburn arrived as the sun reclimbed the sky.
The hot and hellish pile poured into his steaming eyes.
He planted his heart there
and spoke three promises.
1. He would honor the men who died here.
2. He would rebuild. And bigger.
3. He would make sure this never happened again. Even if it meant reinventing the milling industry.
As you might expect, a man with a name like Cadwallader keeps his promises.
3. He did reinvent the milling industry.
And he openly shared his advancements with all his competitors.
2. He did rebuild. And bigger.
Washburn-Crosby became General Mills.
1. He did honor the men who died there.
He personally cared for their families,
established the Washburn Center for Children,
and commanded plaques and markers bearing their names.
A marble memorial still watches over the entrance
of the rebuilt Washburn mill.
It reads…
The Washburn Mill “A” was totally destroyed
on the second day of May 1878
by fire and a terrific explosion
occasioned by the rapid combustion of flour dust.
Not one stone was left upon another,
and every person engaged in the mill instantly lost his life.
The following are the names of the faithful
and well tried employees who fell victims of that awful calamity.
E.W. Burbank
Cyrus W. Ewing
E.H. Grundman
Henry Hicks
Chas. Henning
Patrick Judd
Chas. Kimball
Wm. Leslie
Fred A. Merrill
Edwd. E. Merrill
Walter Savage
Ole Shie
August Smith
Clark Wilbur
“Labor wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.”
The end.
Did you enjoy the story?
You don’t need to keep reading.
You might not want to…
I found a few questions hiding under flour sacks
in the bashful basement of Washburn’s mill.
These questions are not bashful.
One of them punched me in the eye.
Caution: Shadowy Questions Beyond This Point
Here’s the door. Your call.
What do you think?
Will sparks come for you?
Will your first floor ever touch the sky?
Will your insides be burned out and blackened?
When your heart is planted there,
in that fatal tomb, that fertile womb,
when not one stone is left upon another,
what promise will you speak?
Whose promise will you seek?
—
Bonus Bit: because apparently you know how to take a punch.
Finishing that letter written in marble is a quote from Thomas Carlyle.
“Labor wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.”
He said several curious things about work
circa 1841 in his book Past and Present: The Modern Worker.
Read page 115, where the above quote was originally penned.
also…
“…sweat of the brow, and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart… up to that “Agony of Bloody Sweat,” which all men have called divine!”
“To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind. Heaven is kind – as a noble mother, as that Spartan mother, saying, as she gave her son his shield “With it my son, or upon it!””
I told you he was curious…
and he was a Scot.
A redundancy. You don’t mind, do you?
