In 1942, the US military re-purposed the Cargill shipyard at Savage to produce ships to serve in World War II. By the end of the war, the Savage shipyard had produced twenty-two ships. In 1975, many of these were scrapped, but some eventually saw service overseas.

The European immigrants who moved into southwestern Minnesota in the mid-1800s brought their religious faiths with them. The founders of Immanuel Baptist Church in Westbrook (Cottonwood County) moved into the first church building erected in the village after the members of that original congregation moved on to other areas, leaving the building vacant.

Murray County was established in 1857 and formally organized in 1872. Although Currie was the original county seat, the city of Slayton won a contentious battle for that title in 1890. Agricultural production has been (and continues to be in the twenty-first century) the county’s primary industry.

Gustavus Adolphus College, the dream of Swedish immigrants, began as a humble secondary school in Red Wing with one student in 1862. Relocated to St. Peter in 1876, it has flourished as one of Minnesota's private liberal arts colleges.

In the late 1960s, Allan Fingerhut and Danny Stevens leased the old Greyhound Bus Depot in Downtown Minneapolis with the plan to open a rock club. Since then, First Avenue & 7th Street Entry has nurtured a diverse group of musicians, both local and national, and brought together people from various backgrounds. It remains one of the most highly regarded music nightclubs in the country.

Founded in 1994, the Minneapolis-based Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota (CSCM) is one of the oldest Somali-operated nonprofit organizations in the state. For more than two decades, it has provided job and education services as well as health care and legal assistance to members of the community who face language and cultural barriers.

Ojibwe oral tradition identifies Little Round Hill, a small elevation on the banks of the Crow Wing River, as the location of a late-1700s French fur trading fort and a skirmish between Ojibwe hunter-traders and Dakota warriors. Located in Old Wadena County Park at the confluence of the Partridge and Crow Wing Rivers, it was the site of the first intensive archaeological excavation within Wadena County.

Minneopa State Park, located in southern Minnesota, is Minnesota’s third-oldest state park. It was created in 1905 to preserve Minneopa Falls, a two-tiered waterfall once described as nature’s masterpiece. The park has since expanded to include Minnesota River frontage, the historic Seppman stone windmill, and a herd of American plains bison.

By the late 1890s, bonanza farming had stopped bringing good incomes to large landowners. Immigrants who arrived in northwestern Minnesota learned quickly that the Red River Valley soil was some of the richest in the state. An experiment station was started in 1895 that led to the founding of a boarding high school to train young people to work on farms as farmers and homemakers.

The Cadotte Post was a fur trade encampment in the late eighteenth century—one of three archaeological sites in Wadena County identified through Ojibwe oral tradition as a late-1700s trading fort. It stood just north of the Crow Wing River on its east bank, south and opposite the mouth of the Leaf River in what later became the Old Wadena County Park.