A resource for reliable information about significant people, places, events and things in Minnesota history.

Headline and accompanying photograph printed in the November 6, 1924 edition (page 10) of the St. Paul Daily News.

The Smallpox Epidemic of 1924–1925

Minnesota's worst documented encounter with the virus

Photograph of Crispus Attucks staff and residents moving to 1537 Randolph Avenue in Highland Park, 1908.

Crispus Attucks Home (St. Paul)

A refuge for African American orphans and elders

A cyanotype photograph taken from the site of the town of Nininger c.1890.

The Boom Town of Nininger

The rapid rise and fall of a Dakota County community

The Merritt family some twenty years before they began mining operations on the Mesabi, 1871.

The Merritt Family and the Mesabi Iron Range

Five brothers, two of their nephews, and the world's largest iron mine

Images of the Honeywell Round thermostat (at left) and the Honeywell factory in Golden Valley c.1955 (at right)

The Honeywell Round Thermostat

The world's most iconic home thermostat

Photograph of reference monument 44, Rose Island, Lake of the Woods. The monument marks the northwest point of Lake of the Woods on Rose Island. Photographed by William E. Lass on May 23, 1972.

The Northwest Angle

The northernmost piece of Minnesota and a geographical accident

Splitting Granite, Cold Spring Granite Company, Cold Spring, Minnesota, c.1938.

Cold Spring Granite Company and the Henry N. Alexander Family

Building a quarrying dynasty in the heart of Minnesota

Pastor Bernt Muus (left) and Oline Pind Muus (right)

Muus v. Muus

The 1879 lawsuit that scandalized a small immigrant community

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Recently Added Articles

Beltrami Island Project

The Beltrami Island Project was a pioneering land program of the New Deal enacted across hundreds of thousands of acres in northern Minnesota. Federal and state governments worked side by side to move residents off of poor farmland as well as to restore forest across areas of the cutover region.
Adas Israel Congregation, Duluth

Adas Israel Congregation was founded in 1885. Members met in a house on St. Croix Avenue in what is now the Canal Park area of Duluth. It incorporated in 1899. The families that formed the congregation were Lithuanian immigrants.
Temple Israel, Duluth

Two of Duluth's oldest Jewish congregations—Temple Emanuel and Tifereth Israel—had little in common after they were founded in the 1890s. While Temple Emanuel was affiliated with Reform Judaism, Tifereth Israel conducted worship services in the Orthodox tradition. Tifereth Israel's 1945 shift to Conservative Judaism, however, coupled with the decline of Duluth's Jewish population, led the two congregations to unite in 1969 as Temple Israel.
Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children

The Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children operated from 1886 to 1947. The campus is one of the most intact examples of a state cottage school standing in the United States, and is significant on a national level.
The Smallpox Epidemic of 1924–1925

Minnesota's worst known encounter with smallpox came in 1924 and 1925. Five hundred people died—four hundred of them in the Twin Cities. Almost 90 percent of the Twin Cities deaths took place in Minneapolis.
The Rock Island Excursion of 1854

On February 22, 1854, the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad completed the first rail line to connect the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. To promote that feat the company contacted notable East Coast citizens and journalists and invited them to ride their train to Rock Island. From there, the visitors took a steamboat trip up the Mississippi, stopping at St. Paul. The journalists, pleased with what they saw, wrote of the beauty and splendor of a region that many in the East thought was little more than a wilderness.
Wahl, Rosalie (1924–2013)

Rosalie Wahl was a pioneering figure in Minnesota law during the second half of the twentieth century. She became the state's first female Supreme Court justice at a time when there were no women on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Crispus Attucks Home (St. Paul)

In 1910 there were over sixty orphanages and homes for the aged operated by and for African Americans in the United States. Minnesota had one of them: St. Paul's Crispus Attucks Home. The home was named for the African American patriot killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770. It served the community for six decades, beginning in 1906 during the Jim Crow era and ending in 1966 at the peak of the civil rights movement.