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The Queen Bee Mill BY WAYNE FANEBUST
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he Queen Bee Mill was the brainchild of R. F. Pettigrew, a Sioux Falls man with an appetite for big spending and building. By taking on the mill project, he was actually carrying out the ideas of the first white speculators who gazed in wonderment at the Falls of the Big Sioux River, awe-struck and amazed at the raw power of the water. It was said that a man from Maine became “halt mad” in the presence of the Falls and the roaring waters that overcame the quiet of the surrounding prairie. The first territorial governor of Dakota, William Jayne, said in his address to the legislature that the Falls of the Big Sioux River had the ”motive power to drive all the mills of New England.” Pettigrew recalled the time he was
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HISTORY
impressed by the sight of a long line of wagons, filled with wheat, creaking their way into Sioux Falls. There were mills on the Big Sioux River including the Cascade Mill, situated above the first cascade of the Falls, but Pettigrew wanted more. He understood that as time went on, more settlers would claim land and start farming, meaning the amount of crops grown would increase. A Sioux Falls newspaper printed a pamphlet that claimed Dakota Territory would grow wheat “as successfully as water rolls down a hill.” Pettigrew had similar beliefs and he decided that Sioux Falls needed a large and powerful mill to grind the valuable crop that the land was producing. Besides, a large, state-of-theart mill would put Sioux Falls on the map and in the minds of skeptical outsiders.
Pettigrew began making plans for such a mill to exploit the power of the Falls. One of the first steps was go get the property owners, W. W. Brookings and Dr. Josiah L. Phillips, to sell the proposed mill site to a group of New York City investors. Then June 2, 1879, it was announced in a Yankton newspaper that the mill property was about to be sold for $45,000.00. A month later, a Sioux Falls newspaper announced that banker George I. Seney, a New York capitalist and art collector, was the leading man in the group of investors, and that negotiations were ended and the deal closed. A company was formed to construct and own the Queen Bee Mill, and Pettigrew and Brookings were among the owners. The 81-acre purchase included the
