When I put together my history bucket list on The Pragmatic Historian, I included as one of the items “Watch fabric dying and weaving within an old mill.” Well, I haven’t been able to watch the processes of weaving and dying fabric within a mill, but I did have an opportunity to take a tour of a woolen mill. Not far from where I live, in Randall, Minnesota, is a fiber arts mecca that started…
A block from my house is one of the oldest industrial areas of the city. The first railroad depot was along this stretch and there used to be a granite works in the strip, which was many blocks long and ran along the railroad line. Most of the track has been abandoned and a feed mill, which operated there for years and years, has pretty much vacated a two-block stretch of property. On one block…
A visitor to my museum suggested I watch “Chef’s Table,” a beautifully filmed Netflix documentary series that follows world-renowned chefs. It’s the sort of series where you can jump in anywhere because each episode focuses on a single chef and is a self-contained story. When I started the series, I seem to have jumped in on *Volume 4, the pastry chefs, but have been making my way back to earlier episodes. (*Netflix calls the seasons…