Koochiching County is established. Ojibwe and Cree people had long used the word "Koochiching" to refer to multiple bodies of water (including the one eventually called Rainy Lake by Europeans and Americans).

The Pillsbury Company announces that it has accepted a $5.7 billion buy-out offer from the British food and liquor conglomerate Grand Metropolitan PLC.

In a milestone in the history of health and medicine in Minnesota, Mary Lund is the first woman to receive a Jarvik-7 artificial heart, in Minneapolis. The device keeps her alive for about a month, until she receives a real heart via transplant.

The Northwestern Telephone Exchange begins operating in Faribault, with forty customers.

The newly finished Foshay Tower, already an icon of architecture in Minnesota, is strung with lights and lit up like a Christmas tree. It was Minneapolis's tallest building for nearly fifty years,

After sixteen month of often bitter protest, four oak trees sacred to the Mdewakanton Dakota community of Mendota are cut down to make way for the rerouting of Highway 55 in Minneapolis.

St. Paul native Paul Molitor announces his retirement from baseball, having spent his final three seasons with the Minnesota Twins. His career hits numbered over 3,000, most of them from his years with the Milwaukee Brewers.

Minneapolis-born aviator Charles "Speed" Holman is killed during an air show in Omaha. A pioneer of aviation, his best-known aerial stunt was looping, and he had won the US air speed trials in 1930. At his funeral, four 109th Air Squadron planes flew in the first recorded Missing Man formation, with a vacant spot reserved in Holman's memory. Holman Field at the St. Paul Downtown Airport is named in his honor.

Governor Stephen Miller declares a Thanksgiving holiday, in accordance with President Abraham Lincoln's recommendation that the last Thursday in November be used for this purpose. Minnesota had celebrated Thanksgiving Day before, usually in December.

Novelist Ernest Hemingway is admitted to St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, where he undergoes shock treatment for depression. A few days later, he commits suicide in Idaho.