Nicollet Island was originally the site of an Indian maple sugar camp, and there’s still a street named Maple Place reflecting this. The Islands woods were “so dense with timber and undergrowth, that it was impossible to penetrate it,” according to one early visitor, who also reported of thousands of passenger pigeons. Half a mile long and shaped like a battleship, the islands fifty acres were purchased in 1848 by Franklin Steele, the founder of St. Anthony.
John Orth, Hennepin County’s pioneer brewer and one of the founders of Grain Belt Beer, dug the first caves in the sandstone under Nicollet Island beginning in 1850 for use as beer storage cellars. By the 1880’s Orth had built an icehouse to replace the cave; the cave was used for mushroom growing as late as the 1920’s. Later under the guise of Satan’s Cave, it became a well-known rendezvous for urban explorers
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Photo Courtesy of Greykat
For most of the 20th century, the U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM) was the primary United States Government agency conducting scientific research and disseminating information on the extraction, processing, use, and conservation of mineral resources.
Founded on May 16th, 1910, through the Organic Act (Public Law 179), to deal with a wave of catastrophic mine disasters, the mission of the Bureau of Mines expanded over the years to include:
- The conduct of research to enhance the safety, health, and environmental impact of mining and processing of minerals and materials.
- The collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about mining and processing of more than 100 mineral commodities across the Nation and in more than 185 countries around the world.
- Analysis of the impact of proposed mineral-related laws and regulations upon the national interest.
- Production, conservation, sale, and distribution of helium for essential government activities
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The Saint Paul Municipal Grain Terminal, also known as the head house (a six-story grain elevator) and sack house, sits on piers over the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was built between 1927 and 1931 as part of the Equity Cooperative Exchange and is a remnant of Saint Paul’s early history as a Mississippi River port city. The Saint Paul Municipal Grain Terminal was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.
The structure is nationally significant as the first successful grain terminal elevator owned and operated by a farm cooperative in the United States. At one time the facility included 90 grain silos, a small mill, the head house for loading grain onto barges and train cars, and the sack house for sacking milled flour.
Currently the complex is unused and in serious disrepair. There have been plans to restore the buildings and turn them into a restaurant and interpretive center.
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The Peavey Company was founded in Sioux City, Iowa in 1874 by Frank H. Peavey. In 1884 he moved his business to Minneapolis and incorporated it in 1906. The firm began as a grain-storage company but in 1928 expanded into flour milling with the purchase of the Van Dusen & Harrington Company, producer of flour under the “King Midas” trademark. In 1954, Peavey acquired the Minneapolis-based Russell-Miller Milling Company and merged all of their flour milling operations under the name Peavey Company Flour Mills in 1963.[1]
The firm went public in 1973 and , in 1982, was acquired by ConAgra, Inc.[2]
In 1982 ConAgra bought the Peavey Company, a Minneapolis-based flour miller and grain trader, giving it 16.3 percent of the nation’s wheat-milling capacity and a system of grain exporting terminals.[3]
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Posted on December 16, 2009 in:
News
Hey all!
Hope your all pleased with how the site is coming along. Its not quite there yet but I’ve got most of the internal stuff working or on its way to working. The trip logs are coming, slowly, but surely.
Just wanted some feedback or suggestions from everyone. Comment this post or email me.
Safe ’splorin!
Grandma’s Restaurant Company was founded on the legend of Grandma Rosa and based on the principle of pleasing customers one at a time. Legend has it a young Italian immigrant named Rosa Brochi opened her first boarding house to lonely sailors in the Great Lakes port of Duluth, MN, near the turn of the 20th century. It was here that she started a lifelong commitment to customer satisfaction. Although its no longer boarding house, founder of Grandma’s Restaurant Company, Andy Bord and Mick Paulucci, have based their success on the principle of Customer Safisfaction. Continuing in Rosa’s tradition, her “Grandsons” ensure that each employee receives detailed training that focuses on warmth, knowledge, teamwork, sincerity, respect, and above all, customer service. Executive chefs in every restaurant make Grandma’s recipes an experience rather than just a meal. Since the “conversion” of the original restaurant on shores of Lake Superior in 1976, Grandma’s Restaurant Company has expanded its operations to include nine casual dining concepts and two retail operations throughout the state of Minnesota.
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Purina Mills, Inc. is the largest manufacturer of animal feed products in the United States, producing more than five million tons of feed each year. Through its 50 feed mills, the company produces thousands of feed formulations specially designed for various types of animals, including beef and dairy cattle, goats, horses, sheep, pigs, poultry, pets, and lab and zoo animals. Purina also operates more than 35 retail outlets, which sell animal feed, lawn and garden supplies, hardware, and related items.
1894: The Robinson-Danforth Commission Company is founded.
1902: Company name is changed to Ralston Purina Company. Company adopts the red-and-white checkerboard logo.
1986: Ralston Purina sells its Purina Mills subsidiary to British Petroleum.
1993: British Petroleum sells Purina Mills to a management group led by the Sterling Group, of Houston, Texas.
1997: Purina Mills rolls out America’s Country Store retail chain, begins buying and reselling hogs in an effort to bolster swine feed sales.
1998: Koch Industries acquires Purina Mills.
1999: Purina Mills files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.
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In 1879, after five years of secret planning, Charles Alfred Pillsbury announced to the public that he would build the largest and most advanced mill the world had ever seen. He had traveled to mills all over the world, searching for the best technique for milling flour on a large scale. Despite the convention of the time, Pillsbury decided that he wanted his new mill to be designed by an architect in order to make the building visually appealing. An architect named LeRoy S. Buffington, with the loose advice of several engineers, carried out the design.
Construction started in 1880 and was finished in 1881 under a contractor named George McMullen. The mill was built to put out 5,000 barrels a day when a 500-barrel mill was considered large. It attracted a lot of attention from many people who thought that there was no practical need for a mill to ever exist due to the demand of flour in the day. For some years the mill was not run at its intended capacity. Part of the building was used as a warehouse and for other purposes.
Due to vibrations of milling machines and poor design in 1905 the mill was fortified and certain sections were rebuilt. To this day the walls bow 22 inches on the top. Unlike other similarly large mills in the area, most notably the Washburn A Mill, the Pillsbury A Mill never exploded or caught fire. And as a result, it still contains its original wood frame.
As the years progressed, mill output picked up due to technological advances in the milling industry. However other larger mills were created elsewhere and the sparkle that once surround the great mill left.
The building is a National Historic Landmark and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.
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Ramada opened its first hotel – a 60-room facility – on U.S. Route 66 at Flagstaff, Arizona in 1954 and set up its headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, where the chain built the Sahara Hotel on North 1st Street downtown in 1956 (which later became the Ramada Inn Downtown) and a 300-room Ramada Inn in the 3800 block of East Van Buren in 1958 that would become the chain’s flagship property and headquarters. Mr. Isbell, like his contemporary, Kemmons Wilson, the founder of the Holiday Inn hotel chain, devised the idea of building and operating a chain of roadside motor hotels while he was on a cross-country trip with his wife, Ingrid, and their three children. On that trip, Isbell noted the substandard quality of roadside motor courts along US highways at the time. He saw the possibility in the developing market for a chain of roadside motor hotels conveniently located along major highways which would provide lodgings with hotel-like quality at near-motel rates plus amenities such as TV, air conditioning, swimming pools and on-premises restaurants.
The name “Ramada” is derived from the Spanish term “rama” (meaning branch) and was applied to temporary open air structures called Ramadas that were made of brush or branches (similar to an arbor) and were popular in Arizona during harvest time. Company websites commonly refer to the structure as a “shady resting place.”
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This is The Port of Minneapolis, a city-owned barge terminal that is operated by River Services, Inc. Truck traffic makes this a dangerous place. Almost any non-hazardous commodity may be present at this terminal, including grain, lumber, phosphate fertilizer, seed oil, steel, twine, paper, pipes, and salt. The igloo-shaped storage tanks are used for solids, and some are insulated to keep stored products from freezing into one large chunk. Several very large insulated liquid storage tanks are near the road. These tanks are not currently used, note the vegetation taking root on their roofs. These tanks were for asphalt oil and other heavy oils which need the insulation to keep stored product warm enough to be pumpable. Note the dike around the large tanks, required to keep the contents of the tanks from flowing to the river and streets if the tanks ever should rupture.
The Upper Harbor Terminal is one of only four remaining active barge facilities above the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. The others are Holcim Cement (RM 857.4), American Iron (RM 856.3) and Aggregate Industries (RM 855.9). The According to its “Above the Falls Master Plan” Minneapolis’ long-term plans for the property include converting the riverfront portion of the land to a new park and redeveloping the portion of the land further from the river as housing.
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Nicollet Island was originally the site of an Indian maple sugar camp, and there’s still a street named Maple Place reflecting this. The Islands woods were “so dense with timber and undergrowth, that it was impossible to penetrate it,” according to one early visitor, who also reported of thousands of passenger pigeons. Half a mile long and shaped like a battleship, the islands fifty acres were purchased in 1848 by Franklin Steele, the founder of St. Anthony.
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