A prime example of entrepreneurial spirit, Susie Schmitt Hanson was a pioneer for Minnesota women in business. As the owner of one of Waconia's longest-running businesses, she remains a prominent figure in the history of that town.

The longest continuously running festival in Minnesota history, Stiftungsfest, was founded in 1861. This German festival celebrates the music and culture of Carver County's German immigrants.

Following the death of her husband and their only child, Julia Bullard Nelson of Red Wing, Minnesota headed south to Texas in 1869 to teach African Americans in U.S. government-backed Freedmen's Bureau schools. Nelson spent the summers of the 1870s and 1880s in Minnesota, where she emerged as a state and national leader in the movement for women's suffrage and the temperance campaign against alcohol use.

Early schools in Minnesota were one-room schoolhouses. The first school in Carver County, built in 1855, was one of these. It became part of the first school district in Minnesota, Public School District #1 in Carver, which was formed in 1856.

Cheese making in Minnesota took a backseat to milk and butter production during the nineteenth century. In the early 1900s, Arthur Parkin of Pine Island changed that picture.

Early schools in Carver County were typical of those found in nineteenth-century Minnesota. Schools were small then and grew out of the community's desire to educate local children. They were often held in the same building as the church or town meeting hall, and had ties to both. For this reason, they were not clearly public or private.

When Leonard August Rosing became chairman of the Minnesota Democratic Party in 1896, he had his work cut out for him: Republicans had controlled the governorship since before the Civil War. But Rosing was successful in unseating Republicans and getting Democrat John Lind elected governor in 1898.

Wanda Gág was determined to be an artist from an early age, and ultimately she succeeded. Her talent steered her through family hardship and hesitant early artistic efforts until she created Millions of Cats, her 1928 children's book. It has never been out of print.

From early inns and boarding houses to the magnificent three-hundred-room Hotel Lafayette, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, Lake Minnetonka was transformed into one of the resort capitals of America. In the 1870s and 1880s, tourists from across the nation came to stay at the resort hotels that prospered on the shores of one of Minnesota's most famous lakes.

Chester Adgate Congdon accrued a fortune working as a lawyer for the Oliver Iron Mining Company and through investments in the Mesabi Iron Range. He also served as a Minnesota State Representative from 1909 to 1913.