ABSTRACT
Minneapolis and St. Paul are iconic twin cities, and they have permitted themselves to be so labelled since at least the 1890s. They are twins of the sort that arise side by side along a common border and grow outwards. The area's increasingly dominant large-scale businesses, based not just in Minneapolis–St. Paul but also in the large inner-ring satellites, seem equally enthusiastic. Minneapolis, the slightly younger settlement, was established around St. Anthony Falls, founded by enterprising Yankee capitalists harnessing waterpower to create an industrial dynamo. Feeding on the northern forests and western wheat fields, by the 1880s, Minneapolis was producing more lumber than any other US city and was the world's flour-milling capital. In the same decade, its population overtook St. Paul's, to the latter's fury. The embodiment of industrial capitalism, it was destined for greater success than St. Paul with its mercantile base.
