The Minnesota North Stars were one of the teams created during the National Hockey League’s first expansion in 1966, which finally brought an NHL team to the “state of hockey.” Their twenty-nine-year residency in the state produced two trips to the Stanley Cup finals, but their sudden departure to Dallas in 1993 shocked fans throughout Minnesota.

The former Riverside Hotel at 3631 Bridge Street in St. Francis is the only surviving commercial building dating to the milling boomtown’s original settlement. It was built in about 1860, during the heyday of the local lumber industry that urbanized present-day Anoka County.

Originally built in 1892, the Ramsey School House served Anoka County’s School District #28 until the mid-twentieth century, when the schools in the county were consolidated. The building was then repurposed as the Ramsey Town Hall.

In an eleven-month span between May 1991 and April 1992, the Twin Cities metropolitan area played host to five major national sports championships: the NHL Stanley Cup Finals, Golf’s US Open, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four. This series of events put Minnesota in the national sports spotlight.

The Porter Kelsey house was built in Andover in 1887 from materials produced by the owner’s own brickyard. In 2020, it is one of the few structures built with Kelsey Brickyard brick that still stands in Anoka County.

The history of law enforcement in the Twin Cities, as in the rest of the United States, has been deeply influenced by race. Since the early twentieth century, many Minnesotans of color have responded to racial targeting and police brutality by forming community organizations and citizen patrols; others have served as officers themselves and grappled with racial inequality inside the police force.

Camp Rabideau is a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) site established as part of the “New Deal” in 1933 to help alleviate unemployment during the Depression. Located in Beltrami County, it operated until 1942. It later became a satellite campus for University of Illinois forestry and engineering students; a Native American learning center; and an educational center for Chippewa National Forest visitors.