DUST TO DUST; The great 1878 Mill Explosion

I don't blame C.C. (Cadwallader Colden) Washburn for the tragedy of 1878. Forty years earlier, the ambitious 21 year old had arrived in Chicago with just $5 in his pocket. But by 1855 C.C. had passed the bar, had been elected to Congress from Wisconsin, and was worth at least half a million dollars. Not bad for a kid born with epilepsy. It was about then that his older brother Elihu wrote him, “I don't believe you will be happy until you could buy the entire world.” Elihu was teasing, because C.C. didn't actually have half a million dollars.  Yet. That was how much he had borrowed to buy the companies he had already bought. And now he was trying to rescue a cousin, Dorolus Morrison, who had invested in a money pit called the The Minneapolis Mill Company. The firm had water rights on the west bank of the Mississippi at St. Anthony Falls (above), and the idea was to lease access to mill owners. Within two years, the Mill Company was broke and going broker.

C.C. immediately saw the problem. There were nearly 4,000 people in Minneapolis, and space along the the falls was limited.  In 1856 C.C. bought a controlling interest in the Mill Company, borrowed more cash to build a dam across the falls, and dig a 50 foot wide 14 food deep canal (above) down the west bank, more than tripling the available access to the power of the falling water.  Then he brought in his younger brother William to run the company, while he concentrated on being a congressman. Older brother Elihu was already a congressman from Illinois and baby brother Israel, Jr. had been elected from Maine. They were a very ambitious family.

Within ten years the customers of C.C.'s Minneapolis Mill Company - grist mills, saw mills, cotton mills and woolen mills - were so profitable, that upon his return from service as a Union General in the Civil War, C.C. built his own flour mill. Against the advice of experts, who were predicting a post war recession, it was the largest flour mill in the world. And on William's advice, C.C. hired George Christian to run the Washburn “B” Mill.  Quickly the “B” Mill was a success, in part because of Christian's management and in part because there was no post war recession.

After two more terms in Congress, and a single term as Wisconsin Governor, C.C. returned to his home in La Crosse., Wisconsin.  But he did not retire. On the advice of George Christian, C.C. decided in 1874, to build a second, even larger flour mill in Minneapolis. This one he called the Washburn “A “ Mill.

The “A” mill was 100 feet wide and 147 feet long. Wheat entered on the ground floor and driven by the power of the falling water in the canal, a screw, powered by turbines in the basement  lifted the grain seven and one half stories. Here the grain was fed into a container, into which hot air was blown. 

Once dry, the wheat was carried by another screw down to the sixth floor and crushed between the first horizontal millstones, which cracked the hard center and released the bran. 

Floor after floor the bran descended, with each successive grindstone, 24 pairs in all, crushing the wheat ever finer, with shakers (above) repeatedly shifting the flour...

...until it was returned to the ground floor where the employees bagged the flour and loaded it into....

...railroad box cars waiting along the 32 tracks that then carried it to a hungry nation - half a million barrels of flour shipped in 1873, three quarters of a million barrels in 1874, a hundred thousand more in 1875, and one million barrels in 1876 .

Just like every other day for the previous four years, at six in the evening on Thursday, 2 May, 1878, 200 workers were released from their 12 hour day shift at the Washburn “A” Mill, leaving behind 14 men  overnight to clean up and ready it's machinery  for Friday's shift. 

It is unknown if they faced any difficulties or problems that night, but at approximately 7:20 a man walking across the tenth avenue bridge (above)  reported seeing a flash in the twilight and a “stream of fire” leaping from the basement windows of the Washburn “A”.

He continued, “Then each floor above the basement became brilliantly illuminated, the light appearing simultaneously at the windows as the stories ignited one above the other...Then the windows bust out, the walls cracked between the windows and fell, and the roof was projected into the air to great height, followed by a cloud of black smoke, through which brilliant flashes resembling lightening passing to and fro.” It was later reckoned the massive roof was thrown 500 feet into the air.

Most said they heard three distinct, massive explosions. Reported the Minneapolis Tribune, “...in a twinkling of an eye...the largest, the highest, and probably the heaviest stone structure in Minneapolis, the great Washburn mill...was leveled to the ground....Soon the burning buildings sent their messengers of flame on the wings of the merciless north wind on to other fields of destruction. ... the wonder is that the whole lower portion of the city escaped the fate with which it was threatened.” Great limestone corner stones landed in the back yards of homes eight blocks from the milling district.

The volunteer fire department reported all their alarms went off at the same instant, but if that was because some one near the “A” mill hit the alarm just after the first explosion, or if the blast short circuited the line, will never be known. Ten miles away, the explosions broke windows on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, whose Globe newspaper issued a special edition, saying, “"There is an 'earthquake’ was the expression and thought of hundreds ... and the word went from lip to lip, almost with the rapidity of lightning, that the Washburn mill, which has long and justly been the pride of Minneapolis, had exploded and was destroyed … It was a night of horror in Minneapolis.”

The 130 volunteers of the fire department dispatched every man, rig and horse they had, and quickly found an explanation to the three great crashes which had reverberated across the city. The exploding Washburn “A” mill had set off identical if smaller explosions in the adjacent Diamond and Humbolt mills. The horse drawn steam pumps of the fire department ran for ten hours, pumping over six million gallons of Mississippi River water onto the smoldering wreckage of six flour mills, a cooper shop, a lumber yard, a grain elevator, a machine shop, a blacksmith shop, a planing mill and dozens of railroad cars. The entire fourteen man night shift at the Washburn “A” mill was killed, as well as four men at adjacent mills. Said the Tribune the next day, “Minneapolis has met with a calamity, the suddenness and horror of which it is difficult for the mind to comprehend.”

C.C. arrived by train the next day, and immediately announced he would rebuild. That calmed the bankers and citizens in a city which had just had the majority of its industrial base blown sky high. But massive explosions still had to be explained. Those who favored conspiracies suggested a railroad car loaded with nitroglycerin had been parked next to the Washburn “A” mill, but that was quickly dismissed because even that much nitro would not have produced a blast that big.  A Mill owner from Indiana suggested the spinning turbines had spun so fast they had separated the hydrogen from the oxygen in the water, leading to a hydrogen buildup in the mill. But George Christian, respected operator of both Washburn mills, scoffed at the idea. The cause, he explained, was simple flour dust.

The flour dust did not explode, Christian explained, it just burned very, very quickly. And Professors Peckman and Peck, from the University of Minnesota confirmed this, by experiment. They also suggested the initial spark had come during the night shift's clean up. It was likely a worker was running two millstones in the basement without flour between them, as a shortcut to remove any residue. And like most shortcuts, this one eventually blew up in their faces. Stone sparking against stone had ignited the flour dust raised by the cleaning crew. That is what killed eighteen men.

C.C. made sure his workers were kept on the payroll, by finding them jobs in the old “B” mill. And he did rebuild. But he did not do so by himself. He brought in new money, John Crosby, and as a silent partner he added the technocrat William Dunwoody, who went to Europe as an industrial spy, and stole the best new ideas for milling, like getting rid of the horizontal grindings stones and using steel rollers instead. They gave off fewer sparks, lasted far longer, and by operating in sequence would allow the grain to be ground continuously. The bigger new “A” mill opened in 1879, under the name “Washburn Crosby “A” Mill”. With new dust scrubbers cleaning the air, it would run safely until 1965. under the company's new name, General Mills.  And what is left of that  building is today the “Mill City Museum.”

- 30 -

GO ASK ALICE ROOSEVELT

I wonder how Alice felt when they called her “The Other Washington Monument.” The best nicknames are half jokes and half true, and the truer they are the funnier they are. Her first nickname had been “Princess Alice”, and her second had been bestowed by the press, who dubbed her “Alice in Plunder Land”. And to her credit Alice always got the joke, and always cackled in public. She was tough. When she was a little girl Alice contracted polio, leaving one leg shorter than the other. Her stepmother mercilessly forced the screaming child to painfully exercise her legs, day after day. So dutiful about this was her stepmother, that into her eighties Alice could touch her nose with her toe. Alice was proud of that, but it never earned her a nickname.

“One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you, Don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice, When she’s ten feet tall.”
(Grace Slick – 1966)

Alice was born into the world with a silver spoon in her mouth, the first child of Alice Hathaway Lee and Theodore Roosevelt. Her inheritance turned to tin just two days after her birth when her mother and her paternal grandmother both died on the same day.  Her father Theodore  was so shattered that he never spoke his dear wife’s name again. That also meant he never spoke Alice’s name again, either. Theodore loved his child, and showered her with gifts, but he called her “Baby Lee” and he called her “Mousiekins”, but he never called her Alice. So deep was that scarring that Alice never referred to herself by her first name, either. And Alice was always talking about herself.

Theodore mended his grief by hunting grizzlies in the Black Hills, and Alice was left with her aunt, Anna Bamie Roosevelt. In her autobiography Alice noted, “There is always someone in every family who keeps it together. In ours, it was Auntie Bye.” But she also said that “If auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president.” And Alice should know. Her father was President. When Alice was two her father remarried, to an English woman named Edith Carow, and Alice was sent to live with them. Edith and Theodore would have five children together.  As Alice saw things, her father loved her “one-sixth as much as he loved his other children.”

“And if you go chasing rabbits, And you know you're going to fall, Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you the call. Call Alice, When she was just small”.

Alice grew into the physical embodiment of a John Singer Sargent painting, with a striking beauty, a vicious sense of humor and a first rate brain, allowing her to view the world with what she called a “"detached malevolence”

Her entire life Alice kept one gift, a pillow embroidered with the phrase, “If you can’t say something nice about anyone, come sit right here by me.” She had a simple philosophy; “Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.” “The secret of eternal youth,” she said, “is arrested development.” And Alice should know.

“When the men on the chess board, Get up and tell you where to go. And you just had some kind of mushroom, And your mind is moving slow. Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.”

To Alice, all politics was personal, and everything personal was political. On the day that William Howard Taft (above, left) was to replace her father in the White House, Alice (above, center) lay a voodoo curse on Mrs. Taft by burning her effigy and burying it on the White House grounds. She said of Calvin Coolidge, “He looks like he was weaned on a pickle.” And Warren G. Harding’s White House simply appalled her; “…the study was filled with cronies, the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand--a general atmosphere of waist-coat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside.” Theodore Roosevelt's  White House was clearly superior in every way, in Princess Alice’s eyes.

Not that she made life easy for her father. When he was President, Alice constantly burst into the Oval Office with advice, until Theodore threatened to throw her out a window. The President explained to a visitor, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”  And Alice had no illusions about her father. “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening, ” she said. It could have been used as the sketch of every successful politician, before and since.

Alice disliked Eisenhower, admired the Kennedys, tolerated Johnson, felt warm affection toward Nixon, and refused to even meet Jimmy Carter. But the President she disliked the most was her cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, noting that his branch of the family were “one step ahead of the bailiff from an island in the Zuider Zee.” She explained, “I am a Republican.... I am going to vote for Hoover.... If I were not a Republican, I would still vote for Mr. Hoover this time.” Later, she insisted, “I'd rather vote for Hitler than to vote for (F.D.R.)”, thus becoming the first Republican to use a Hitler analogy against a Democrat.

“When logic and proportion, Have fallen sloppy dead. And the white knight is talking backwards, And the Red Queen's “Off with her head!” Remember what the dormouse said.”

It took me a long time to understand why Alice married Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth. Her 1906 nuptials set the standard for White House weddings. But he was fourteen years her elder, a dedicated alcoholic and a prodigious Lothario. He was also socially skilled and very wealthy.

Still, it was difficult to imagine her enthralled with him, until I came across the story told of a fellow congressman who ran his hand over Nicholas’s bald head, saying, “It feels as smooth as my wife’s bottom.” Whereupon Nicholas ran his own hand over his own head, and announced, “Yes. So it does.” A sense of humor can make almost any sin bearable.

It was not marital infidelity that separated the couple, it was political infidelity In 1912, Nicholas supported Taft’s re-election, while Alice, of course, supported her father Theodore's run under the Bull Moose banner. Theodore lost, but so did Nicholas, which probably saved their marriage.  It was also during this period that Alice conceived her only child, Paulina. Nicholas lost that election, too. He never let on that he knew Paulina was not his, and he loved his daughter for the rest of his life. He was  re-elected in the next cycle, and would eventually become Speaker of the House. So Alice won there too.

 Nicholas died in 1932. And at his funeral someone asked Alice if she also intended on being buried in Cincinnati. Alice replied that would be a fate worse than death itself. When she died in 1980, Alice’s remains were buried in Washington, D.C.

“Feed your head. Feed your head.”

In her autobiography, Alice wrote of her stepmother Edith’s “fairness and charm and intelligence, which she has to a greater degree than almost any one else I know.” It was almost, but not quite, an acknowledgement of what a pain in the ass Alice had been to her stepmother . And it was certainly not an apology. As far as I can tell, Alice never apologized to anyone. Ever.

- 30 -

THE STORM OF 1775

I would describe 1775 as a year of significant events; Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill; in Germany it was the year the last woman was hanged as a witch; and then there was the hurricane. One random afternoon that late summer, over the bone dry high pressure incubator that is the 3 ½ million square miles of the Sahara Desert, where the summertime temperature can reach 135 F (57.7 C), a monster was quietly conceived.

Of course the Sahara alone, for all its hot breath, cannot produce a monster. It also requires a womb,  - in the case of the great Atlantic hurricanes , the Sahel, an Arabic word meaning “shoreline”. Far from the sea, this is where the sands of the great desert meet the shrub and trees of the savanna. Every April to September, at about 16 degrees north latitude, (what is called the Intra-Tropical Convergence Zone) the hot dry easterly Jet Stream off the Sahara meets the rainy season humidity spinning westward over the Sahel, and pulses of thunderstorms burst forth from thin air, one after another, with a new wave forming every three to four days.

Most of the storms which form over the great Niger River Bend, over Mauritania, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote Diviore, fade and are forgotten like drops of water in a dry riverbed. But a few cumulus towers collide with the cold air above 42,000 feet, forming anvil topped thunderheads. The anvils form because as the air rises the temperature and its ability to hold moisture drops. The flat lid marks the boundary between the humid troposphere and the arid stratosphere. And eventually, once the thunderstorms grow large enough and last long enough, their squall line of angry air passes yet another Sahal, this one the border between Africa and the tropical Atlantic Ocean.

Some 300 miles off the African coast, what was at first an easterly wave of thunder storms, sails past the Cape Verde Islands like a stately fluffy fleet of sailing ships of the line. And now it is persistence that chooses which storm will earn fame. Over time the friction between the troposphere below and the jet stream above convert the vertical heat engine of the thunderstorms into a horizontal sweep, gathering together squalls and storms and driving them in a counter-clockwise spin. Sometime in mid-August of 1775, as one spinning storm set sail for the new world, it became a nameless tropical depression over the open sea. It went unnoticed because there was nobody with a barometer close at hand.

S

When Christopher Columbus first invaded in the Caribbean, at the end of the fifteenth century, he found people across the region who revered a capricious god of storms known as “Hunrakan”, “Hurakan”, or “Aracan”. Having never heard of the Sahara or the Sahel, the residents of the Windward Islands of Martinique and Dominica, could not have imagined the source of the violence that assaulted them almost without warning on Friday, 25 August, 1775. So, of course, they ascribed it to the mysterious work of the god, this one named Hurricane.

 A report from St. Croix described how ships at anchor desperately slipped their cables, seeking the relative safety of the open sea. It was as likely as not that such gambles resulted in an enigmatic death. Fifty years later the British Admiralty would estimate that each year 5% of all ships in the Caribbean were lost to such storms, taking as many as a thousand sailors each year to watery graves.

One such sailor, Captain John Tollemache of HMS Scorpion, fought this particular storm of 1775 as he crossed down the coast from British occupied Boston, to Bermuda. A week later, on Saturday, 2 September, 1775,  The Storm brushed across the outer banks of North Carolina, causing extensive property damage, taking 163 lives in the port of New Bern and destroying the corn crops of Parasquotank County.  The Williamsburg “Virginia Gazette” mourned that, “…most of the mill dams are broke, and corn laid almost level with the ground…many ships…drove ashore and damaged at Norfolk, Hampton and York”.  The British warship H.M.S. Mercury was forced from her blockade of Norfolk, “…and driven aground in shoal water.”  Patriots picked her bones and liberated her cargo, as a gift of the gale.

With its center still off shore this unnamed hurricane swept up Chesapeake Bay.  At 8 on Sunday morning, 3 September, Philadelphia was being pounded by a constant rain . The wind was from the Southeast and the barometric pressure dropped to 29.5 inches of mercury.  By 3 that afternoon the wind had shifted to the Southwest, and records speak of the “highest tide ever known” -  what modern weathermen and women would call a storm surge.   At Newport, Rhode Island, the wind shifted from the Northeast to Southeast between 10am and 2:30pm.  As that Sunday ended and the 4th of September began, the storm turned northwestward, and headed out to sea. There was only one landmass in the new world remaining between the hurricane and its ultimate fate over the cold waters of the Labrador Current; Newfoundland.

There were thousands of fishermen on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. September was the peak season for the long finned squid (Logilo pealiei), used as bait for Cod fishing. And fishermen from all around the Atlantic basin came here every fall to take their share of the bounty.

 But this season the squid had made no appearance until late in the afternoon of Saturday, 9 September  when they suddenly descended on the jigging hooks in an ominous blizzard. The squid were even attacking each other while writhing on the hooks.  What was driving these cephalopods to such as frenzy?

As the fishermen happily pulled in their abundance they noticed that the dying sun was blazing in an odd orange tint, and that the wind was freshening and gathering. As darkness enveloped the fishing fleets the more cautious captains made for Salvage Point or Ochre Pit Cove. But none of these anchorages would be protective enough.

That night the sea and the air conspired to murder men and their works. Ships which had thought they were safe, were battered onto rocky shores. In Northern Bay (two above) three hundred sailors and fishermen drowned by morning, their white and bloated bodies strewn across the rocks like beached dolphins. They now lie in a mass grave in the Provincial Park. Human bones would continue to wash ashore on this beach for years to come.

At Harbor Grace, 30 miles to the south, 300 boats and all their crews were lost while at anchor. In Placentia (above), dawn found the most substantial community in Newfoundland, with almost 2,000 residents,  awash in a six foot storm surge. Those who survived did so by climbing into the rafters of their attics. A fishing schooner was thrown up on the beach overnight. The only surviving crew member was a boy, lashed to the wheel. Off the Avalon Peninsula two navy schooners were sunk and dozens of fishing ships were dismasted and left adrift.

In the narrow harbor at St. Johns (above), on the east coast, the storm surge was 30 feet, and seven hundred boats , large and small, were submerged and smashed to bits against each other and the rocks. Fishermen from St; Johns, pulling in their nets on Tuesday, 12 September, found between 20 and 30 human bodies tangled in them.

After it was all over a review of the losses listed by Lloyds would produce the startling figure of 4,000 dead, mostly Irish and English, in the fishing fleets off Newfoundland. Rear Admiral Robert Duff, Governor of Newfoundland, attempted to detail the disaster for his superiors back in London; “I am sorry to inform your Lordship that…the fishing works in those places…were in a great measure defaced…I cannot give your Lordship a very correct estimate of the damages sustained by this storm; but (you) should image…that the amount of it in shipping, boats, fishing works etc. cannot be less than thirty thousand pounds…” (about $40 million today). There was barely a house left on Newfoundland with an intact roof or chimney, even if they had not been flooded out. The hurricane of September 1775 remains, more than two hundred years later, Canada’s deadliest natural disaster. For decades afterward the survivors on Conception Bay claimed to still hear the desperate cries of the lost souls in the cold surf.

As for the storm itself, conceived over the hot dry Sahara and born of the warm equatorial waters, it could not simply die. Once over the colder currents of the North Atlantic the storm converted from a warm core to a cold one, drawing a diminished power not merely from air pressure variations but also from temperature divisions, becoming just another in the unending string of common “baroclinic” cyclones that march across Europe. But I like to think that this was the particular storm that passed over Carrickfergus castle, outside of Belfast, Ireland in 1775, and which brought with it such violent and continuous lightening and thunder that it was said the Scotch and Irish fairies were doing battle in the heavens above.

That would be a significant enough ending for such a significant storm in such a significant year.

- 30 -