Grain Processing Industry

Grain Processing Industry. An ancient industry, grain processing in America can be traced from the simple mortar and pestle used by Native Americans and colonists alike to complex modern processing centers and multinational enterprises.The industry's rise paralleled the broader economic, agricultural, and technological developments that made the United States the world's leading food exporter.

Gristmills, such as the one at Jamestown in 1621, ground corn and wheat for meal and flour, helping to feed the colonists while making the millers key local figures. The earliest mills, and the vast majority up to about 1800, operated as custom mills that ground the farmer's grain for a toll in flour paid to the miller. The essential role of milling in local agricultural markets is evident in that public authorities offered development incentives and regulated the mills closely. Distant and foreign markets soon became important as well. As more farmers grew surplus wheat, many millers were acting more like merchants, buying and processing wheat for sale as flour. By 1792, these mills near the major seaports exported 824,000 barrels of flour to the West Indies and southern Europe. From 1815 to 1827, Baltimore was the leading U.S. flour market, with Rochester and Buffalo growing in stature after completion of the Erie Canal.

As late as the 1780s, the milling process—sieving, cleaning, winnowing, and grinding the grain by millstones—involved strenuous human labor. The industry's subsequent history is linked to improvements in power sources and technological innovations, from human and animal labor (horses, mules, oxen), to wind, water, steam, and electrical power. In 1782, Oliver Evans, a Delaware‐born inventor, developed an automated process that used a waterwheel to turn the millstone, reducing by half the labor force needed in larger mills, eliminating much of the hard physical labor, and increasing the amount of flour extracted from wheat.

Grain processing mirrored the increasing corporatizing of the economy. The rise of St. Louis as an important milling center by 1870, for example, reflected not only its proximity to the prime winter‐wheat growing areas, but also its access to river navigation and its ability to negotiate favorable railroad rates.

In 1871, Edmond LaCroix built a new type of grinding machine that overcame Minnesota's hardy spring wheat which was difficult to grind and produced a poorer quality of flour. This “new process” gave spring‐wheat flour, and Minneapolis, market dominance. Compact and efficient metal roller grinders that increased production and lowered costs, introduced from Hungary in 1873, marked another key technological advance. After 1900, bleaching processes improved quality and ended the adulteration of flour with alum or chalk.

Minneapolis's preeminence also reflected new modes of business operation, mass production, aggressive marketing strategies, trade associations, strong local financial institutions, railroad expansion into new wheat areas—and the business acumen of Charles A. Pillsbury (1842–1899), whose Pillsbury Company led all others by 1880. By the 1890s, facing competition from the expanding Kansas City Turkey Red wheat market, and a shift in consumption patterns from home‐baked to store‐bought bread, Minneapolis milling companies sought new locations, such as Buffalo, closer to urban markets in the East. Mergers in the 1920s consolidated milling and baking companies into such conglomerates as the General Mills Corporation. From the local mills of early America, the U.S. grain‐processing industry by the late twentieth century had evolved into vast corporate enterprises with a global reach.
See also Agriculture; Business; Canals and Waterways; Food and Diet; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Global Economy, America and the; Industrialization; Technology; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Charles Bryon Kuhlmann , The Development of the Flour‐Milling Industry in the United States, 1929.
Herman Steen , Flour Milling in America, 1963.
George Terry Sharrer , Flour Milling and the Growth of Baltimore, 1783–1830, Univ. of Maryland diss., 1975.

Ginette Aley