Each week, MinnPost brings you a highlight of our state’s past from MNopedia, an encyclopedia of Minnesota history written by experts and produced by the Minnesota Historical Society.
This content is shared with MinnPost by MNopedia, the digital encyclopedia created by the Minnesota Historical Society and supported by the Legacy Amendment’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
The skates were popular with professional and amateur skaters in the United States and other countries because of their consistent high quality, which was achieved through a secret hardening process.
The Southside was a stable neighborhood of working and middle-class African Americans, many of whom owned their homes. Residents formed a tight-knit community with businesses, churches, and social clubs.
Nationwide, the reformatory movement was focused on “reforming” mostly white sex workers and other low-income women. Minnesota’s was considered among the best reformatories in its early years, and visitors came from around the world to see its design and programs.
The statue is widely recognized as a Minnesota roadside attraction and serves as an icon of the region, particularly in tourism promotion.
An 1820 treaty between the United States and the Dakota specifically set aside the 320-acres Wita Tanka, also called Pike Island, specifically for Pelagie Faribault.
As proposed by two partnering utility companies, the CU Powerline would have stood 150 feet tall and cut across 8,000 acres of farmland in North Dakota and Minnesota. The plan sparked outrage in western Minnesota for its indifference toward small family farms.
Gonzaga strenuously defended herself, saying, “I have always earned an honest living, although I have not found life as bright as most people…I have always found it easier making a living doing women’s work than men’s.”
The newly completed stone prison received its first prisoners in 1854.
Three key developments fueled the growth of Minnesota’s tourism industry in the early Twentieth Century: increased leisure time for the middle class, the automobile, and a Back to Nature Movement that encouraged city-dwellers to escape into wilderness settings.
A slip in the midst of a detour to hide a bag full of coins started a fight that ended with the banker, Lindberg, dead of multiple hatchet wounds.
Polish Americans are an enduring presence in a state popularly known for its Scandinavian and German populations.
The image of himself that Nelson cultivated — both fully Norwegian and fully American, a promoter of Norewegians as a desirable immigrant population — is reflected in the history of the Knute Nelson Memorial.
In the 1980s, Governor Rudy Perpich touted Minnesota as “the brainpower state.” This is, ultimately, the story of Minnesota’s economy.
On June 15, 1920, a mob of 10,000 people oversaw the lynching of three African American circus workers falsely accused of rape in downtown Duluth.
The original ideal for the road was part of an overall plan to connect Minneapolis’ major parks with parkways.
Commissioned by the Lindbergh Fund and the Minnesota Historical Society, it honored the aviator’s 1927 transatlantic flight and his childhood roots in Minnesota. It did not address Lindbergh’s support of American isolationism and antisemitism leading up to World War II.
The John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon takes its name from an Ojibwe mail carrier named John Beargrease, who was born in 1858 and grew up in a wigwam on the edge of Beaver Bay.
The first structure, an 1888 “summer garden and amusement hall” built by Thomas Lowry, burned down after just three years.
At the time that Prairie Home Cemetery was founded, it was situated well out of town and surrounded by farmland. The first recorded burial there was typhoid victim Bernard Berg on May 19, 1875.
Paige won the election for representative of Minnesota’s thirtieth district on November 7, 1922.
