In the 1950s, planned construction of Interstate Highway 94 (I-94) threatened to fracture four Twin Cities neighborhoods: Rondo, Prospect Park, Merriam Park, and Seward. Although each community responded differently and achieved different results, all were models of persistence and resistance.

The house built in the 1880s by Henry G. Leathers on a site near the Rum River is a prime example of late-Victorian architecture in Anoka County. Used as both a dry goods store and a family home, the building is dually significant—first for its level of preservation and second for its association with a family that contributed to the commercial, social, and religious history of the town of St. Francis for three generations.

In early 1953 Minnesota’s new US Attorney, George MacKinnon, began an attack on organized interstate prostitution in the Upper Midwest, centered in Minnesota on John’s Bar and Funhouse in Northeast Minneapolis. When the campaign ended in mid-1956, John’s Bar had lost its license, and 110 men and women had been convicted of violating the Mann Act.

Though taconite was identified as an iron-bearing rock on the Iron Ranges of northern Minnesota long before the 1950s, it wasn’t until then that it was extracted, processed, and shipped to steel mills on the Great Lakes. As natural ore reserves diminished, taconite became an alternative source of iron that allowed the Iron Range to continue mining operations in a changing global economy.

Originally built in the 1870s at 214 Jackson Street in Anoka, the Jackson Hotel was destroyed in an 1884 fire. It was quickly rebuilt and continued to function as a hotel until 1975, making it a center of local commerce and social gatherings for more than ninety years.

In 1969, members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005 called a strike against Twin City Lines (TCL), the metropolitan area’s largest privately owned bus company. Most union members and patrons probably didn’t realize it at the time, but that strike would prove to be a critical turning point for Twin Cities public transit. It would provide the opportunity for public acquisition of the company and dramatic service improvements.

Designed by noted architect Frederick Marsh, this seventeen-room Georgian Revival-style home, built in Anoka in 1904, received the name “Colonial Hall” courtesy of its original residents, the doctors Alanson and Flora Aldrich.

The I-35W (Interstate 35 West) bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis opened to traffic in 1967. Thousands of vehicles drove across it every day, but no one imagined that a mistake in the bridge’s design, made over forty years prior, would have such disastrous consequences on one summer evening in August of 2007.

The Oliver Iron Mining Company was one of the most prominent mining companies in the early decades of the Mesabi Iron Range. As a division of United States Steel, Oliver dwarfed its competitors—in 1920, it operated 128 mines across the region, while its largest competitor operated only sixty-five.

Whitewater is the sixth Minnesota state park, authorized by the legislature in 1919, and the first in the Driftless Area of dramatic bluffs, ravines, and promontories in the southeastern corner of the state.