Virginia MN, 1920s and 2020

I’m in Virginia Minnesota today, at the site of what was once the world’s biggest white pine lumber mill. The Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company operated from around 1907 until 1929. It was partly owned by Frederick Weyerhäuser and partly by Edward Hines. In its day this mill claimed to be the worlds largest, with a capacity of a million board feet a day. This panorama shows logs waiting on Silver Lake to be processed. On the left is the Virginia Brewing Company building, and on the right the VRL mill.

The next panorama is of the two mill buildings, the log dock, and in the distance the planing mill.

Finally, here’s what the area looks like today. The Brewery building is just to the right of the blue water tower, so everything to the right of that would have been log docks and mill buildings. There’s a park there and a nice paved path circles the lake. The big structure to the left of the water tower is the Virginia Department of Public Utilities, a municipally-owned electricity and steam plant.

More images and history when I return home and make sense of everything I grabbed and scanned today.