Flour

a fine meal. In American usage, flour, if unmodified, is understood to mean wheat flour. It is obtained by crushing wheat kernels and sifting the fine particles through bolting cloth. The mills of primitive man form an interesting chapter in archaeology. They consisted at first of a hollowed stone in which to place the kernels and a second stone used as a hammer to crush the grain. The druggist's mortar and pestle is but a primitive mill. Then came the rocking stone for the upper stone, and when later a sweep was lashed to the upper stone and persons or animals were employed to push the sweep and turn the stone, the world had the upper and the nether millstone, in essential respects,--the mill that served its purpose for centuries, and it may be for thousands of years, but at all events until the Hungarian steel roller process was adopted.

The American colonists sent back to Europe for small mills as soon as they began to raise grain. The Dutch set up a horse-power mill on the island of Manhattan as early as 1626. In 1628 there is record of a windmill near Watertown, Massachusetts, and of a water mill turned by the falls of the Neponset at Dorchester in 1634. By 1649 Virginia was exporting wheat flour, the product of four windmills, five water mills, and an unknown number of horse mills on various plantations. Delaware became noted for flour shortly after the Revolution. Wilmington was the center of a flouring district that included 130 mills. Many of these were driven by the Brandywine River.

The seat of the flouring industry shifted from time to time and new centers grew up, first along the Atlantic, then in the interior. Three factors were essential, a region of wheatgrowing, water power, and facilities for shipment of flour. Thus we find that, in 1840, Baltimore and the Patapsco river had sixty flouring mills; in 1845 Richmond and the James river had twenty-one, including the largest mills then known. Richmond shipments amounted to 250,000 barrels a year. The wheat of the Mohawk Valley, the falls of the Genessee, and the Erie Canal made Rochester the great milling center of North America for a time. In 1865 the Rochester mills ground 800,000 barrels of flour. With the introduction of steam power, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and other milling centers were developed. Flour milling at the Falls of St. Anthony began with a small, crude government mill in 1823. It supplied the garrison at Fort Snelling with flour. Merchant milling began here in 1854. By 1878 Minneapolis contended with Budapest, Hungary, for the honor of being the greatest milling center in the world.

About this time, or a little before, the Hungarian process was introduced. The old process of grinding between two stones aimed to pulverize the kernel as completely as possible at a single operation. In the new process, the grain passes between several sets, the more the better, of chilled iron or porcelain rollers, each successive pair of which is set a little closer than the preceding pair. The idea is to crack the kernel, not to crush it, and to crack the fragments finer and finer, sifting out the fine flour at each step. The new process is one of breaking or cracking, rather than of grinding. It is claimed that it saves the gluten and produces not only more flour, but a superior article.

The milling centers of the United States and Canada are:

In 1905 the mills of the United States ground 494,000,000 bushels of wheat, and produced 104,000,000 barrels of flour.