Herbjorn Gausta, one of the first Norwegian American professional artists, gained critical acclaim during the late nineteenth century for creating images of landscapes, people, and daily Norwegian American life. He may be best known, however, for his religious work, which comprises over 400 rural church altar paintings.

Clara Ueland was a lifelong women’s rights activist and prominent Minnesotan suffragist. She was president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association when the nineteenth amendment was passed in 1919. That same year, she also became the first president of the Minnesota League of Women’s Voters.

St. Olaf College is a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. It was founded by Norwegian Lutherans in 1874 and continues to thrive as a top-ranking school.

In 1990, workers installed a three-by-six-foot aluminum highway sign reading “Mississippi River” in Russian on the I-94 Dartmouth bridge between St. Paul and Minneapolis. It had been prepared by the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s sign shop in Oakdale for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the Twin Cities on June 3. Gorbachev’s motorcade passed the sign on that day as he and his wife, Raisa, began a historic visit that established a friendly relationship between the Soviet Union and the North Star State and signaled the approaching end of the Cold War.

Minneapolis-born Cora Johnstone Best achieved international success as a mountaineer during the 1920s. She was a pioneer in the sport, becoming a licensed guide at a time when women were rarely given the opportunity to be lead climbers.

Harmony’s Greenfield Lutheran Church traces its history to 1856, when Norwegian immigrant families began holding religious services in the settler-colonist community of Greenfield Prairie. In 1913, a brick church was built a half mile to the north in Harmony. It became the congregation’s permanent home and one of the city’s most beautiful architectural landmarks.

Between 1820 and 1910, it is estimated that at least 30,000 people emigrated from the Swiss canton of Graubünden to the United States. Included in this number were Romansh people—members of an ethnically distinct Swiss population—headed for Minnesota. Beginning in 1854, they settled in Stillwater, St. Paul, the St. Henry Colony (Le Sueur County), the Stillwater-sponsored Badus Colony (South Dakota), and other communities throughout the region.

A Cathedral Hill landmark, the Dacotah Building in St. Paul is best known for the businesses that have thrived under its roof, including pioneers of the local food movement.

Ernest Reginald Wabasha, also known as Caŋku waste waŋ ohna ya (He Travels a Good Road), was a sixth-generation hereditary chief in a long-established Dakota chieftainship. Through repatriation efforts and tribal leadership initiatives, he worked to re-frame histories of the Dakota people and expand narratives of their experiences.

The Fillmore County Poor Farm, outside the small village of Henrytown, was part of a statewide initiative in the late 1800s to provide housing for poor and elderly people. At its start in 1868 it was considered one of the best of Minnesota’s county poor farms, but it eventually fell victim to a lack of funds and resources.