Gaze across campus, or across the river from any bridge in Minneapolis, or really, across any place anywhere that people have shaped. Everything you see—it might have been otherwise. The built environment is an essentially random result of the specific interplay of singular people, the moment in which they lived, and the structures they called into being (the work itself generally done by others).

Historians understand this particularly well. For half a century, Robert M. Frame III (Ph.D. ’80), architectural historian and author of Making Mill City: Flour and Fortune in Minneapolis, has studied the downtown industrial riverfront we now call the Mill District. This expressively old and storied part of the city just upstream of the West Bank includes the Stone Arch Bridge, the Mill City Museum, and a redeveloped collection of limestone former warehouses and flour mills that today house artists’ lofts, a farmers market, and some of the priciest real estate in Minneapolis.

Frame has walked through those buildings and others that exist only in memory, explored archives packed with decisions and drama, and witnessed one of the area’s major disasters: the 1991 fire that destroyed the shuttered Washburn A Mill. Once the world’s largest flour mill, it introduced groundbreaking milling technologies, produced billions of sacks of flour, and was home to the Betty Crocker Test Kitchens. Bisquick and Cheerios were born there. For a time, WCCO—then Washburn-Crosby Company Radio—even broadcast from the utility building.

The winter night the mill burned, Frame stood with his children across the river and watched flames consume the structures. Just a few years earlier, he had helped document the area for Minnesota Historical Society.

“I had been inside all those buildings and I saw the historic equipment and artifacts inside of them, preserved as if the workers had just left for the day. I understood how important it all was. It was like burning down a museum,” he says. “That was a tragic loss.”

Fifty years in the making

Frame’s research played a part in the district’s eventual reconstruction and the rebirth of the Washburn ruins as Mill City Museum and a National Historic Landmark. This complex preserves artifacts of Minnesota’s industrial culture across three centuries, including the riverfront buildings and bridges, a trove of flour milling ephemera, and stories from labor history—including great parties and tragic losses—vividly described in Frame’s book.

His graduate research culminated in a thesis about flour mills, but Frame didn’t stop researching when he left the University. It turned out that was the beginning of his book. “It was 50 years in the making,” he says. “I didn’t plan it that way, but I started in 1976, and everything after that somehow fell into the pages.”

Making Mill City includes architectural and engineering drawings, excerpts from trade newspapers, photographs of the riverfront as it changed over time, and flour advertisements. A multidimensional project like this requires perspectives beyond history; one might say it requires an American Studies major.

Looking at history in a new way

In the late 1960s, the University of Minnesota’s American Studies program was already well known, even though the field was still in its infancy. Professors like David Noble and Hyman (Hy) Berman brought together an interdisciplinary mix of humanities and social sciences to create a new understanding of American life.

That appealed to Frame; from the start, he had followed his interests “somewhat randomly” to create a unique path. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and joined the Army after high school.

“My mother wasn’t happy about that; her memories of World War II were still fresh,” he says. But he was placed in the Army Security Agency, a branch filled with college graduates, and was taught Morse Code to monitor foreign military communications. Stationed in Thailand, he monitored transmissions between Hanoi army headquarters in North Vietnam and North Vietnamese units in South Vietnam.

“It was a fascinating experience and an insight for a young person into national and international politics and how the world really works. I was channeled right into a path to college as soon as my three-year enlistment ended in June 1964.” Soon after, fighting broke out in Vietnam.

On the G.I. Bill, Frame attended Shippensburg University, where a professor noticed that Frame was “interested in, well, everything,” and suggested the humanities major take that curiosity to graduate school.

“Minnesota was one of the first schools that began American Studies, and the American Quarterly journal was edited here for a long time,” Frame says. In those days, professors migrated from other departments, so students could take classes from specialists in literature, history, architecture, sociology, music, geography, and archaeology.

“David Noble would draw big circles on the board, representing the different eras, and he would show how they overlapped and evolved and related to each other,” Frame recalls. “It was a perfect experience for me. Afterwards, I realized I’d learned a different kind of history: not just the names and dates and people in buildings, but the intellectual history. That approach made it a lot more interesting. It made sense.”

A lifelong learner

Frame emerged from his thesis studies in the archives and began gathering his own research. For organizations like the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS); MnDOT; and city, state, and federal preservation entities, he’s researched, documented, and helped preserve industrial structures across the state and beyond. Each project arose almost randomly: Frame was the right person in the right place at the right time.

In the 1980s, Frame surveyed structures in southeastern Minnesota for MHS. “I looked for things that looked historic, just tried to spot them on the landscape, and then see whether they were worth exploring further.” That led to a list of structures for the National Register of Historic Places. Frame found grain elevators just as fascinating as flour mills; that led to Grain Elevators in Minnesota, a study of grain elevators built before 1945.

As one project ended, another opportunity arose, and many ran concurrently. During the first decade of his career, Frame organized the papers of J.J. Hill for MHS, which brought him back to the mills and the Stone Arch Bridge, bankrolled by the lumber baron. “He spent more than he had to and made it beautiful, and made it last,” says Frame, who eventually became—self-taught—one of the country’s foremost bridge experts.

When a new bridge is built or demolished in Minnesota, in some way, Frame has been involved. “I developed a survey of every bridge built in Minnesota before 1945 that is still used by MnDOT,” he says. As senior historian at Mead & Hunt, where he is winding down his formal career, he has consulted on the preservation of the Stillwater Lift Bridge for pedestrians and the new bridge built for cars.

Like those overlapping circles on David Noble’s blackboard, bridges, grain elevators, and flour mills are all related to one another, and all figure prominently in Making Mill City. “I think my work on the book is kind of a continuation of my whole education. In a way, I’ve turned the Minnesota Historical Society into a university for me.”

Sometimes Frame is consulted for new building projects. Other times, he’s the last person to preserve the memory of places destined for destruction. “I think I’ve become more open and sympathetic to having some structures that can’t be reused go away,” he says. “If you document it properly, then you have done about as much as you can to save it.”

If you liked these stories, Minnesota Alumni magazine publishes four times a year highlighting U of M alumni and University activities. Early access to stories and a print subscription are benefits of being an Alumni Association member. Join here to receive a printed copy at home.