Remembering Minnesota’s Freedom Riders
The Minnesota Freedom Riders were part of a second, expanded stage of the original Freedom Rides.
Paul Nelson
Duluth’s Glensheen estate is one of the best-preserved mansions of its kind in Minnesota
The house is famous for its beauty inside and out — and as the site of one of Minnesota’s most notorious murders.
Minnesota’s Morton gneiss is one nice-looking stone
Quarried in Renville County, Morton gneiss is one of the oldest stones on the planet: about 3.5 billion years old.
On 14th anniversary of his death, remembering the career of Sen. Paul Wellstone
Among successful Minnesota politicians there have been orators, Easterners, professorial types and Jews. Only Wellstone was all of these.
St. Paul’s first murderer: Edward Phelan (probably)
On September 27, 1839, Dakota boys found a body washed up under Dayton’s Bluff, near Carver’s Cave (Wakan Tipi).
Minnesota and Wisconsin’s own Platteville limestone totally rocks
The stone is characterized by its gray color, rough texture, and many fossils.
St. Paul’s Indian burial mounds are among the state’s oldest human-made structures
Along with mounds in Crow Wing, Itasca, and Beltrami Counties, they are some of the northernmost burial mounds on the Mississippi River.
The worst natural disaster in Minnesota history was a forest fire
The Cloquet and Moose Lake fires left over 450 dead, fifteen hundred square miles consumed, towns and villages burned flat.
Dayton’s: More than a century of Minnesota retail
One of America’s great retail empires was built on a foundation of Minnesota farmland.
How James J. Hill built a transportation empire in Minnesota
Hill assembled a rail network that stretched from Duluth to Seattle across the north, and from Chicago south to St. Louis and then west to Denver.
How a conservative Republican got elected to Congress by Democratic St. Paul — seven times
Melvin Maas was first elected to Congress in 1926, becoming its youngest member at age twenty-eight.
The architect of Minnesota’s mansions: Clarence H. Johnston
Johnston left a built legacy unmatched in Minnesota.
The Cathedral of St. Paul: a masterpiece dreamed up by Archbishop John Ireland and architect Emanuel Masqueray
There have been four Roman Catholic cathedrals in St. Paul. The first three were built between 1841 and 1858. The fourth, and the most architecturally distinctive, opened in 1915.
How a St. Paul meeting of the National Afro-American Council reshaped the civil rights movement for decades
St. Paul lawyer Fredrick McGhee organized the meeting and hoped that it would produce a more united and effective national civil rights organization. The opposite occurred.
St. Mary’s Orthodox Cathedral in Minneapolis was Catholic until Archbishop Ireland stepped in
The church was started by a community of Rusyns who immigrated to Minneapolis from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century.
St. Paul’s Oakland Cemetery was Minnesota’s first public cemetery
It’s a gathering place, in death, of people from the full range of St. Paul history, from the city’s founders to recent immigrants.
Homicide at Rochester State Hospital, 1889
The 1889 death of inmate Taylor Combs led to a scandal, and then major reforms, at the Rochester State Hospital for the Insane.
St. Paul’s evolving Central Park: from upscale to playground to parking ramp
From 1885 to 1961, St. Paul had a Central Park.
The controversial execution of Ann Bilansky
The prosecutor himself wrote of his “grave and serious doubts as to whether the defendant has had a fair trial.”
The near-lynching of Houston Osborne, 1895
No lynching is known to have occurred in the Twin Cities, but St. Paul came close with the near-lynching of Houston Osborne in 1895.
