MINNEAPOLIS

city, seat of Hennepin county, eastern Minnesota, U.S., port of entry at the head of navigation on the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Minnesota River. With St. Paul (q.v.) across the river, it forms the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The state's largest city, it has 22 lakes and lagoons and more than 150 parks within its limits. Lake Minnetonka (12 mi long, with 110 mi of irregular shore line) is in the western suburban area; its outlet, Minnehaha Creek, flows eastward along a residential boulevard and then drops 50 ft (15 m) over an escarpment at Minnehaha Falls. The Franciscan missionary Father Louis Hennepin visited the area in 1680 and named the Falls of St. Anthony, which later (1823) provided power for grinding flour for Ft. Snelling, a military outpost at the confluence of the rivers. The village of St. Anthony, which developed on the east side of the falls, was incorporated in 1855. Settlers soon began occupying U.S. military-reservation land on the west side of the river; and in 1855 the government gave these illegal squatters patent rights, and the village of Minneapolis was incorporated in 1856. Its name was derived from the Dakota (Sioux) word minne, meaning water, and the Greek polis, for city. St. Anthony was chartered as a city in 1860 and Minneapolis in 1867; the two cities merged as Minneapolis in 1872. The falls were an important factor in the city's early economic growth, first as a lumber centre (1848) and, later, as a flour-milling centre. The lumber business reached its height in 1899, when logs from the forests of the north jammed the river. As wheat growing in the northwest increased, flour milling superseded lumbering as the leading industry (the last lumber mill closed in 1919). Railroads, multiplying connections with Chicago and the south, and with the east through Sault Ste. Marie, were completed in the late 19th century. After World War I the availability of lower freight charges by means of Great Lakes shipping shifted much of the export flour trade to Buffalo, though Minneapolis remained the headquarters for five large milling companies. In the second half of the 20th century, the city remained one of the nation's primary wheat markets; the Minneapolis Grain Exchange is one of the largest cash grain markets in the world. Minneapolis, with St. Paul, is now the commercial and industrial centre of an extensive agricultural area; highly diversified manufactures include food products, farm, electrical, and transportation machinery, printing and publishing, metal and paper products, precision instruments, chemicals, and apparel. The city is the seat of the University of Minnesota (1851), Augsburg College (Lutheran; 1869), Dunwoody Industrial Institute (vocational; 1914), Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1886), and the North Central Bible College (1930). Of historical and cultural interest are the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre (home of the state repertory theatre), the American Swedish Institute, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Public Library's science museum and planetarium, and the Hennepin County Historical Society Museum. Pop. (1990) city, 368,383; MinneapolisSt. Paul MSA, 2,464,124.