In 1904, Charles W. Malchow was a professor of medicine at Hamline University Medical School who had studied abroad in Germany and England. He had a happy marriage, a medical practice in downtown Minneapolis, and a house near Lake of the Isles. He was young, handsome, successful, and ambitious. Then he went to prison.

Superior National Forest is an iconic part of northeast Minnesota that comprises over three million acres (more than 445,000 of which are surface water) of boreal forest. The forest itself is part of the vast North Woods, a tourist destination in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) is within the forest, which is itself part of the Quetico Superior region that extends into Canada.

The November 1914 death of Mary Fridley Price made the front page of the Minneapolis Journal: “Woman Killed in Attempt to Save Pet Dog.” Her grieving husband, Fred Price, told police she had fallen off a Mississippi River bluff in a vain attempt to keep her dog from going over. But by January 1916, that grieving husband was at the center of a sensational murder trial, accused of shoving her off the cliff for her money.

The Minnesota Valley Historical Society (MVHS) was formed in 1895 under the leadership of Charles D. Gilfillan to determine and mark sites significant to the US–Dakota War of 1862 in Redwood and Renville counties. MVHS was largely Gilfillan’s project. He founded it, was its principal leader during its most active period, and personally funded significant portions of its work. After his death in 1902, MVHS became much less active, and the group dissolved in 1915.

Drag performance, historically referred to as “male impersonation” or “female impersonation,” was a popular act in Minnesota theater from the 1880s through the 1920s, reflecting the heyday of vaudeville nationally. As vaudeville declined after the 1920s, drag moved to standalone performances in bars and nightclubs, intertwining with Minnesota’s increasingly public queer scene. The shift coincided with drag queens of color gaining visibility and the emergence of drag celebrities—not just as humorous side acts in larger productions, but as artists in their own right and practice.

August Ruther, who served in the German army in the 1890s, was charged with poisoning his brother-in-law in Rice County in 1917. Despite any direct evidence, a jury convicted him in eighty minutes, in large part due to anti-German nativism during World War I. His sentence was commuted to time served (eighteen years) in 1936.

Sometime past midnight on Friday, November 1, 1907, “the ringing of a fire bell rang out,” as reported in the Hastings Democrat. Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) was engulfed in flames. The little white frame church that had stood on the corner of Fifth and Sibley Streets had been established by the Black residents of Hasting’s community. Two weeks prior, they had celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of “having a place of their own."

A cornerstone of the prison labor system for almost eighty years, the binder twine factory at the Minnesota State Prison employed thousands of inmates who produced over a billion pounds of cordage for regional farmers. The twine-manufacturing industry began at the original facility and continued at a custom-built factory on a new site after the prison moved in 1914. The factory closed in 1970.

Cecelia Regina Gonzaga, an African American assigned a male sex at birth, lived in St. Paul for four weeks during the summer of 1885. After a police officer arrested her for wearing women’s clothes on August 20, he took her into custody and questioned her at the Ramsey County Courthouse. He released her later the same day, but Gonzaga quickly left the city by train and returned to St. Louis.

Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater, Minnesota’s oldest prison, was built in Stillwater as the Territorial Prison in 1853. It moved to a location in what is now Bayport between 1910 and 1914. MCF-Stillwater has been the site of multiple rebellions and also publishes the Prison Mirror, likely the oldest continuously operated prisoner newspaper in the US.