A fierce fire discovered shortly after 2:00 A.M. at the School for the Feeble-Minded in Faribault badly damages the main building and causes the safe evacuation of more than 300 people who had been sleeping in the structure. Unable to get their ladder wagon to the school, local firemen drag a hose through the building and up four flights of stairs to the attic and bring the flames under control.

Norman E. Borlaug, University of Minnesota alumnus and crop researcher, receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his research in hybridizing wheat to increase crop yields. Borlaug is known as the father of the green revolution.

The dwellings in Swede Hollow, a St. Paul immigrant neighborhood, are burned after the city health department declares them contaminated.

After a sensational trial, Harry T. Hayward is hanged in a Minneapolis jail for the murder of Katherine Ging, owner of a fashionable dressmaking establishment. He had arranged for her to be killed so that he could collect her life insurance money.

Henry M. Rice easily replaces Henry H. Sibley, who chose not to run for re-election, as Minnesota Territory's delegate to Congress. Sibley had won the office by a narrow margin in a previous election following a heated campaign involving fur-trade interests, with "fur" symbolized by Sibley and "anti-fur" by Alexander M. Mitchell, the candidate supported by Rice.

During Alexander Ramsey's term as mayor of St. Paul, the city council establishes its first professional fire department, which succeeds a volunteer hook and ladder company and inherits its equipment, including an engine, ladders, ropes, hooks, and axes, as well as a church bell donated by the Reverend Edward D. Neill.

The Grand Opera House in Minneapolis hosts the first American performance of the English translation of Donizetti's opera Anna Bolena.

The Target Center arena opens in Minneapolis.

Author Kathleen Winsor is born in Olivia. Her novel Forever Amber, published in 1944, would be banned in Boston because of its sexual content. With that publicity, it became a best seller.

Celebrating Minnesota Day at the World's Fair in Chicago, twenty thousand of the state's residents view exhibits of the state's resources and hear the First Minnesota Regiment's band.