General Mills "A" (Duluth, Minnesota)

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Site is man-made fill. Several wooden elevators once occupied the site and extended much farther out to the northeast along the pier; they were all demolished by the 1940s. The brick and concrete head-house was built in 1908 and concrete silo annexes were added to it sometime in the teens and '20s. Early on the facility operated under several owners, including the Duluth Elevator Co. It came under General Mills ownership by the 1970s at the latest, and the steel storage bins were added later that decade.

A receiving hopper was added to the head-house in the late 1980s to allow for the delivery of grain by self-unloading lake freighter, and from then until the early 2000s it was common to see a dozen or so Canadian ships discharging cargoes like oats and barley here for transfer to rail and delivery to customers to the south and east. No such delivery has been made for almost a decade.

These days Elevator A is the Twin Ports' primary handler of sugar beet pulp pellets, a byproduct of the beet sugar refining process which makes excellent livestock feed. The pellets arrive by rail and are typically loaded aboard small, ultramodern European-based oceangoing freighters for export overseas. Main destinations for the beet pulp pellets loaded here include Morocco and Spain. Shipments also go fairly regularly to Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Italy.

During the last peak in grain shipments from 1998 - 2001 the terminal was fairly busy with Canadian lake freighters loading wheat and soybeans for transfer to oceangoing ships at Gulf of St. Lawrence elevators. It still handles the occasional shipment of such 'traditional' grains. Of note in recent years was the export of field peas to Cuba loaded here.

Since 2013 Elevator A sat dormant until being purchased in the early 2020s by Omaha-based Hansen Mueller, and in 2023 has once again commenced activity, loading half a dozen vessels during that year's season.