Beulah Brunelle (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) and Edna Larrabee escaped from Shakopee State Reformatory for Women five times between 1946 and 1949. Though most of the breakouts ended in their recapture within a few days, their fourth escape, in 1949, led to eight months of freedom and allowed the two women to live together as a couple while traveling around the United States.

A fire inside a stable kills 128 trained horses belonging to Battery F of the 14th Field Artillery at Fort Snelling.

Cecelia Regina Gonzaga, an African American assigned a male sex at birth, lived in St. Paul for four weeks during the summer of 1885. After a police officer arrested her for wearing women’s clothes on August 20, he took her into custody and questioned her at the Ramsey County Courthouse. He released her later the same day, but Gonzaga quickly left the city by train and returned to St. Louis.

By the late 1950s Minnesota’s legislative districts—last configured in 1913—had become alarmingly imbalanced. Though the state constitution required the districts to be drawn “in proportion to population,” the populations of House districts ranged from 7,290 residents to 107,246, and Senate districts from 16,878 to 153,455. It would take fourteen years, three federal lawsuits, three special sessions of the legislature, three governor’s vetoes, one trip to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and one to the US Supreme Court to fix the problem, and then temporarily. Twenty years and one more governor’s veto later, the US Supreme Court intervened again.

The International Eelpout Festival in Walker began in 1980 as a way to bring tourists to northern Minnesota during the long winter months. Centered on what is considered the state’s ugliest fish, it grew into an annual four-day festival that has attracted national attention and thousands of visitors.

On September 3, 1894, a headline of the Minneapolis Tribune screamed, “A Cyclone of Wind and Fire: Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin Bathed in a Sea of Flame and Hundreds of Human Lives are Sacrificed to the Insatiable Greed of the Red Demon as He Stalks through the Pine Forest on His Mission of Death.” In just four hours on September 1, the red demon destroyed an estimated 480 square miles, resulting in massive destruction and over 418 deaths. The fire zone lay within Pine County, which was named for its majestic white pine forests.

Minnesota’s suffragists worked tirelessly to win the vote beginning in the late 1850s, when Mary Colburn delivered what is believed to be the state’s first women’s rights speech. After a long struggle, the dream of equal suffrage took a big leap forward on September 8, 1919, when the state legislature voted to ratify the woman suffrage amendment, making Minnesota the fifteenth state to do so.

Between 1934 and 1945, many local advocacy and state legislative efforts were introduced to preserve the Nerstrand Woods as the last sizable remnant of Minnesota’s “Big Woods.” On March 28, 1945, the bill establishing the Nerstrand Woods State Park was approved by the legislature. It was signed by Governor Edward J. Thye on April 2.

A four-day event celebrating the Norse-American Centennial begins at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds in Falcon Heights.

The construction of a high-voltage power line across west-central Minnesota in the 1970s created a dispute about land use and energy needs that pitted farmers against large utilities and governmental agencies. The farmers began their opposition to the line by appearing at governmental hearings and in court proceedings. When those methods proved unsuccessful, protesters employed more confrontational methods.