Governor Arne H. Carlson signs the HealthRight bill into law. Providing medical insurance for low-income Minnesotans, the program is later renamed MinnesotaCare.

The state government allocates $5,000 to open the Gillette State Hospital for Crippled Children in St. Paul. Named for Dr. Arthur J. Gillette, it is the first state-funded hospital of its kind in the nation.

A group of Belgian settler-colonists, led by Angelus Van Hee, arrives at Grandview in Lyon County. The village is renamed Ghent in honor of the group, which had been invited to the state by Bishop John Ireland.

Samuel Medary takes office as Minnesota's third and final territorial governor. He steps down thirteen months later when Minnesota becomes a state and Henry H. Sibley is elected governor. Medary would later become territorial governor of Kansas. He died in Columbus, Ohio, in 1864.

Governor Adolph O. Eberhart signs a law abolishing the death penalty in Minnesota.

Alexander Ramsey dies at age eighty-eight. During his political career, Ramsey served as Minnesota's first territorial governor and second state governor, negotiated major land sales from the Dakota and Ojibwe, and served in the US Senate and as secretary of war. A founder of the Minnesota Historical Society, he was its president at the time of his death.

Cadwallader C. Washburn is born in Livermore, Maine. A pioneer in the state's flour-milling industry, Washburn built his first mill at St. Anthony Falls in 1866, and his Washburn-Crosby Company marketed Gold Medal flour. He died in 1882.

The Minnesota Twins (formerly the Washington Senators) play their first game at Metropolitan Stadium, losing to the new Washington Senators, 5-3.

The legislature creates a state public library commission, which establishes a system of traveling libraries to serve rural areas.

James K. Hilyard, an African American entrepreneur and intellectual, dies in St. Paul. In addition to being co-founder of the Western Appeal, one of Minnesota's first black-owned newspapers, Hilyard, by active recruitment through newspapers and personal connections, was largely responsible for the influx of African American professionals into the state in the 1800s.