Clarence "Cap" Wigington is born in Kansas. Minnesota's first African American registered architect and the nation's first African American municipal architect, he designed civic and residential buildings in St. Paul and created six designs for St. Paul Winter Carnival ice palaces during his lengthy career. He died on July 7, 1967.

The steamer Manistee sinks in Lake Superior. It had left Duluth on November 10, but a gale had driven it into port at Bayfield. Captain John McKay tries to force passage on this night, and twenty-three of the sailors aboard are never seen again. A lifeboat carrying three survivors washes ashore a few days later.

Faribault hangs its first street signs.

The preparatory (or high school) department of what is now Hamline University opens for business in Red Wing. Named for Leonidas L. Hamline, a Methodist bishop, the school suspends operations in 1869 and reopens in St. Paul in 1880, but its original founding date makes it the oldest college in the state.

A fire at St. Peter State Hospital (later renamed the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center), a mental asylum, kills between ten and fifteen inmates. The first mental institution in the state, the asylum had opened on December 6, 1866.

Montezuma is founded by Orrin Smith, a steamboat captain. The town is more recognizable by its present name, Winona.

Author Meridel Le Sueur dies in Hudson, Wisconsin. Born in Murray, Iowa, on February 22, 1900, Le Sueur moved with her family to Minnesota when she was twelve. A reporter and the author of novels and short stories, she was blacklisted for being a member of the Communist Party. Her work was rediscovered and heralded by feminists in the 1970s.

Mike O'Dowd, the "Cyclone of St. Paul," defeats Al McCoy to win boxing's middleweight title, which he holds until 1920.

Harrison Salisbury is born in Minneapolis. A reporter and author, he was especially noted for his writing on the Soviet Union, and in 1955 he won the Pulitzer Prize for international correspondence.

Englishman Jonathan Carver enters Wakan Tipi, the cave and sacred site in present-day St. Paul, long used by Dakota people, that white settler-colonists would come to call by his name (Carver's Cave). Carver writes in his diary: "...came to the great stone cave called by the Naudowessies [Dakota] the House of Spirits. This cave is doubtless a greater curiosity than my short stay and want of convenience allowed me to sufficiently explore."