The term "Land of Lakes" is first applied to Minnesota in the St. Anthony Falls newspaper the Falls Evening News.

The first state legislature convenes, five months before Minnesota is admitted to the Union. Despite its questionable legality, the session passes over ninety laws and elects Henry M. Rice and James M. Shields as US senators. The pair travel to Washington, DC, and wait for statehood to become official so that their terms can begin.

Against a background of war in Europe and bitter pro- and anti-union activity in the Twin Cities, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party are found guilty in Minneapolis on a count of conspiring to undermine the loyalty of U.S. military forces and of publishing material advocating the overthrow of the government. Vincent R. Dunne, a leader in Teamsters Local 544, and the other defendants are, however, found not guilty on a count of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government by force.

At the Washington Navy Yard, Susan L. Mann christens the steam frigate Minnesota with a bottle of Minnesota water. On April 6 of the previous year, Congress had authorized construction of this ship and, coincidentally, the frigate Merrimac. Rebuilt as a Confederate ironclad and renamed the Virginia, it attacked the Minnesota during the Civil War.

The first issue of Ignatius Donnelly's newspaper the Emigrant Aid Journal is published in Philadelphia. The publication encourages recent immigrants to move to Nininger, a town Donnelly had founded on the Mississippi River downstream from St. Paul. Although 1,000 people lived there at its peak, the town eventually failed. The editor of the Emigrant Aid Journal was A. W. MacDonald, who later edited Scientific American.

The Minnesota Vikings football team plays its first game, beating the Chicago Bears 37-13 at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington.

Warren E. Burger is born in St. Paul. As chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1969 to 1986, his major opinions would include the decision requiring President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes and his dissent in the Bivens case, attacking the exclusion of illegally seized evidence.

Civil War veterans of Company B of the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment form the Last Man's Club, meeting yearly at the Sawyer House in Stillwater. They preserve a bottle of wine to be opened by the last survivor, who would be Charles M. Lockwood, the sole attendee of the 1930 banquet.

Rene Boucher, the Sieur de La Perriere, lands on Lake Pepin's western shore with plans to build a military post. Fort Beauharnois is built and the Mission of St. Michael the Archangel, the first Christian mission in Minnesota, is established on a site near present-day Frontenac.

Henry Charles Boucha is inducted into US Hockey Hall of Fame. An Ojibwe man born in Warroad on June 1, 1951, Boucha had been a star player on the US Olympic team and had played professional hockey for the Detroit Red Wings and the Minnesota North Stars. After an eye injury forced him to retire, he served as coordinator of the Warroad Public Schools Indian Education Department.