Forty-one iron-ore miners drown or are fatally buried in mud and seven more escape by climbing a ladder during the Milford Mine Disaster, which occurs north of Crosby on the Cuyuna Range in northern Minnesota when a nearby lake suddenly empties into an underground mining operation. A county inspector, who had visited the mine the week before the accident, would later state that every precaution had been taken and that the flooding was unavoidable.

Redwood County is established and named after the Redwood River (Ċaŋṡayapi Wakpa in the Dakota language). Previously part of Brown County, this territory would later become, in addition to Redwood, the counties of Lac qui Parle, Lincoln, Lyon, and Yellow Medicine.

The Minnesota territorial legislature votes to make St. Paul the capital and to build a prison in Stillwater.

Gaa-binagwiiyaas (Which the Flesh Peels Off, also known as John Smith), an Ojibwe man reputed to be 137 years of age, dies at Cass Lake.

Sarah Jane Steele is born in Pennsylvania. She married fur trader Henry Sibley in 1843; when he became the state of Minnesota's first governor in 1858, she became its first First Lady. Before her death in 1869, she advocated for historical preservation, making a particular effort to save and interpret Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. The Sibleys' own house in Mendota has been called "the Mount Vernon of Minnesota."

The Minnesota Federation of Colored Women's Clubs is organized in St. Paul. Popular at the turn of the century, women's clubs were reform and social welfare organizations.

Two men rob the Shenandoah Pharmacy on Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. Police officers Carl A. Johnson and C. E. Bettinger shoot twenty-one-year-old Eddie Larson after he fires at them from behind a counter. Johnson wounds nineteen-year-old Fred Sammler, who is rifling through the cash register. Larson dies shortly after arriving at General Hospital, and Sammler later admits that he and Larson had committed several holdups earlier that evening.

The University of Minnesota's School of Agriculture defeats Hamline University 9 to 3 in the world's first intercollegiate basketball game, played on the Hamline campus by nine-man teams, who shot the ball into peach baskets without backboards.

When the Fergus Falls State Hospital opened its doors on July 29, 1890, it became the first state institution in northern Minnesota for patients considered insane. The hospital had a sprawling campus and large stately buildings, built according to the influential asylum plan developed by Philadelphia physician Thomas Kirkbride in the 1850s.

The Fifth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment's Civil War service included participation in thirteen campaigns, five sieges and thirty-four battles, including duty on Minnesota's frontier during the US–Dakota War of 1862. They were the last of the state's regiments to form in response to President Lincoln's first call for troops.

The Fillmore County Poor Farm, outside the small village of Henrytown, was part of a statewide initiative in the late 1800s to provide housing for poor and elderly people. At its start in 1868 it was considered one of the best of Minnesota’s county poor farms, but it eventually fell victim to a lack of funds and resources.