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.
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.
Born in Minneapolis, Schulz first published Li’l Folks, the predecessor to Peanuts, in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Built as a replacement for the original St. Paul Opera House, the Grand Opera House included new interior design features, electric lighting, and safety enhancements.
After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Kempfer ran for a seat in the legislature representing House District 50. She had the support of suffragists as well as business leaders and local politicians.
National Woman’s Party of Minnesota founder Sarah Tarleton Colvin called on women to abandon what she saw as the prevailing tactic of the day — gently guiding powerful men to support suffrage — and urged them instead to demand their rights.
In 1937, Parks was waiting tables on a train when he came across images of Depression-era migrant workers taken by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers. He was inspired to buy a camera at a pawn shop and became a self-taught photographer.
In the Ojibwe language, wild rice (Zizania palustris) is called manoomin, meaning “good berry,” “harvesting berry,” or “wondrous grain.”
AIM had identified the urgent need for Indigenous children to be educated within their own communities.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art opened in 1915, an outgrowth of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts.
Along with a large assembly hall, the building featured a bowling alley, a social hall, a maplewood dance floor, and a children’s play area.
Forty percent of the area of Voyageurs is covered in lakes.
Crowning the monument is a statue of Josias R. King, who is widely regarded as the first US volunteer in the Civil War. King also participated in violent campaigns to punish Dakota people after the US-Dakota War of 1862, known as the Punitive Expeditions.
Around midnight on July 10, 1970, four teams of two or three people each broke into Selective Service offices in Little Falls, Alexandria, Winona, and Wabasha, intending to destroy as many military draft files as possible.
Kegg’s life was life guided by cultural traditions, continuous adaptation to a fast-changing world, and an inherent skill for interpreting her people’s culture and history.
Olson’s conservation efforts in the Quetico-Superior region aided in the establishment of Voyageurs National Park (the name is credited to Olson) and the designation of the BWCA as a wilderness area in 1978.
Since the 1890s, the Mesabi has produced iron ore that boosted the national economy, contributed to the Allied victory in World War II, and cultivated a multiethnic regional culture in northeast Minnesota.
