This tour will allow participants to examine representatives of the kinds of industrialization that occurred in rural towns of the Upper Midwest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. First stop will be the Faribault Woolen Mill Company, an enterprise that dates to 1865. First developed as a carding mill, the business expanded in 1872 to make cloth, including blankets, a product-line for which the business is well known. The mill receives wool and processes the fibers in the carding, spinning, dying, and weaving departments to make finished blankets.
Faribault Woolen Mill
Dyeing has been a part of the Faribault Woolen Mill manufacturing sequence since its beginnings over a century ago and the kettles currently used were installed during the 1950s. These kettles have now been transformed to utilize local river water by cleaning/filtering it after being used. Photo: Faribault Woolen Mills.
Next stop on the tour will be of Northfield Machinery Builders, Inc., a business founded in 1920 to make commercial-grade intermediate and heavy-duty woodworking machinery, including radial saws, band saws, planers, and jointers. The business runs a complete machine shop and also an electrical shop in which it makes its own motors.
The historic Ames Mill in Northfield, home of the Malt-O-Meal cereal product, photographed in 1976. Photo: Minnesota Historical Society
After a lunch on Northfield’s Bridge Square (in view of the historic Ames Mill, where Malt-O-Meal is made, and of the bank that Jesse James and his gang tried to rob in September 1876, when they were defeated by Northfield townsfolk) SIA members will re-board the bus and travel to Cannon Falls.
1000 Hills Cattle Company
At Cannon Falls, we will visit the 1000 Hills Cattle Company, an enterprise that specializes in grass-fed beef. The company purchases grass-fed cattle from local farmers, slaughters the animals at the Lorentz Meats slaughterhouse in Cannon Falls, and packages and markets cuts of beef for retail sales, restaurants, and food coops. Our tour will include details of both the process and the benefits of raising grass-fed beef and a tour through the slaughterhouse, which is said to be the only USDA-certified slaughterhouse in the U.S. that allows public tours. Because the slaughterhouse is a food-processing area and is tightly regulated by the USDA, we will always be separated from the processing areas by glass.
As part of the tour, we will have an opportunity to view the killing floor, but there the glass is elevated, so anyone who wishes NOT to see the killing floor will be able to avoid doing so. In other words, a person can participate in all of the rest of the tour without having to view the killing floor. The “disassembly line” in slaughterhouses was one of Henry Ford’s inspirations for the development of the assembly line at the Ford’s Highland Park plant in the 1910s, so this will be an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in that phase in the history of industrial technology.
Note: If you have already registered for this tour and would now like to switch to different Friday Tour, please contact the SIA Conference Registration office as sia@mtu.edu.
