The Demise of an Iconic Plant..... (part 1)

 

Sometimes you need a little bit of history before you can actually post your own photos. Therefore, this first blog post starts with a little bit of history. The history of a location that is still very dear to many folks living in the area.

 Springfield Illinois got the official word that Pillsbury Mills wanted to build a major flour processing plant locally on May 8, 1929.

Springfield had been in competition with cities in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan along with other communities in Illinois. The city’s advantages, according to the announcement, included a good available workforce, a location in the middle of a productive grain belt, and excellent rail connections.

Once Springfield won that contest, officials focused on two possible building sites: the one at 15th and Philips that was eventually chosen, and one somewhere on the south side – the exact spot was never reported. The north end got the nod mainly because the mineral rights to that property had never been sold, meaning a coal mine could never be dug under the plant. Soil samples also showed the ground was more suitable than on the south side, and, to top off the deal, what are now the Illinois and Midland railroad yards existed already, right next door.

Pillsbury officials said the new plant would cost $1 million to build and at first would employ 150 people Although Pillsbury imported about 40 workers from its Minneapolis headquarters – managers, chemists and head millers – most of the jobs went to central Illinois residents.

Counting equipment and other addons, the plant ended up costing $1.25 million, the equivalent of about $18 million in 2021. 

(photo courtesy of  Birds Eyeview)

Pillsbury started increasing the mill’s capacity almost as soon as it went into operation. The company added a 2-million-bushel wheat storage elevator in 1934 and the following year added a fifth floor to the specialty building.

When the first addition was completed, the plant was using 11 million bushels of wheat every year. In 1936, the plant’s main product was Pillsbury’s Best flour. But it also manufactured Sno-Sheen cake flour, wheat cereal, Farina Health Bran, wheat bran, Daisy feed, and flours to make pancakes, buckwheat pancakes and doughnuts. Yellow and white corn meal and hominy grits were produced elsewhere but packaged here in Springfield.

 The Springfield plant underwent three major expansions – in 1937 and in the late 1940s and late 1950s.

The 1937 project, which included a nine-story warehouse and grinding/sifting building, doubled Pillsbury’s grain storage capacity.

 During World War II, most of Pillsbury’s output went to the military, and expansion plans for Springfield were put on hold. As soon as the war was over, however, the company announced its next big project. This was the period when Pillsbury employment grew fastest, from about 500 workers shortly before the war up to 1,100 in 1950. Women also started to become more prominent among Pillsbury’s workforce, partly, no doubt, because so many men had gone to war.

 The 1949 addition allowed Pillsbury Springfield to make premix products not for homemakers, but for bakeries, restaurants and institutions. Products Pillsbury manufactured in the new facility included mixes for doughnuts, sweet dough, cake bases, doughnut coating sugar, and institutional type mixes. This project also included new administrative offices and a front-door reception area.

The third big expansion in Springfield broke ground in 1958 and opened in 1960. The most obvious addition this time was a 10-story storage warehouse, but Pillsbury also modernized its milling facilities and further updated equipment for flour handling and packaging. Even before this round of construction, the Springfield plant was Pillsbury’s biggest, and the 1958 project made it bigger yet.  A total of 1,215 people worked at Pillsbury locally as of 1958.

 In announcing the new construction in 1958, Pillsbury president Paul Gerot declined to estimate how many people the plant would employ in the future. What he did say was that automation would reduce the number of “inefficient” jobs, but those might be offset by the creation of new jobs. The fact is, however, that three years later, Pillsbury’s local workforce had dropped about five percent. It was the start of a slow decline that got a lot faster later in the ‘60s.

(Photo courtesy of Sangamon Link )

 Cutbacks in Springfield started in earnest in 1964, when Pillsbury closed one of its three local mills. About 100 people lost their jobs that time around. Then, in 1969, the company cancelled all planned spending on improvements and new machinery, saying the Springfield plant had had “high operating costs for the past several years.”

As late as 1979, however, the Springfield operation was the largest in Pillsbury’s $3 billion empire and had 550 employees.

In 1989, however, a British conglomerate, Grand Metropolitan PLC, bought the entire Pillsbury company. The new owners moved grocery product lines out of Springfield to Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1990, and then in 1991 sold the facility to Cargill Inc. The two moves cut the already shrinking Springfield workforce in half, to fewer than 200 people.

When Cargill closed the plant for good in 2001, only about 45 people still worked there.

Ley Properties Management purchased the former Pillsbury complex — 20 buildings and warehouses and 30 grain silos — from Cargill in 2008 and began a salvage operation. The site was sold again six years later to a partnership, P Mills LLC, owned by Joseph Chernis III and his son, Joseph IV, and Kenneth Crain of Sherman.

P Mills began demolition, but the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency accused the partners of improper asbestos removal. Joseph Chernis IV eventually spent two years in federal prison on charges connected to the removal.

The plant was still derelict in early 2022, when P Mills turned the 18-acre site over to a new nonprofit owner, a group named Moving Pillsbury Forward. Spokesman Chris Richmond, the son of a former Pillsbury employee, said Moving Pillsbury Forward  intended to secure the site from vandals and scavengers and seek redevelopment grants. The ultimate goal was to convert the abandoned plant into a home for light industry.

And so starts my journey......

A group of us "clickers" ventured into the Pillsbury plant to photograph what is left of the iconic plant.

And the next blog post is dedicated to the "NUMEROUS" photos I took while touring the plant.

 

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