Whitewater State Park

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.

Wigington, Clarence (1883–1967)

Clarence Wigington, the nation’s first African American municipal architect, served as lead architect in over ninety St. Paul city projects. His legacy in brick and stone has lasted well into the twenty-first century. He designed both the enduring (schools, fire stations, park buildings) and the ephemeral (five Winter Carnival ice palaces).

Wild Rice and the Ojibwe

Wild rice is a food of great historical, spiritual, and cultural importance for Ojibwe people. After colonization disrupted their traditional food system, however, they could no longer depend on stores of wild rice for food all year round. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this traditional staple was appropriated by white entrepreneurs and marketed as a gourmet commodity. Native and non-Native people alike began to harvest rice to sell it for cash, threatening the health of the natural stands of the crop. This lucrative market paved the way for domestication of the plant, and farmers began cultivating it in paddies in the late 1960s. In the twenty-first century, many Ojibwe and other Native people are fighting to sustain the hand-harvested wild rice tradition and to protect wild rice beds.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls (1867–1957)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was sixty-five when she published Little House in the Big Woods, a novel for young readers inspired by her childhood in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Her book, and the others that followed, made her an icon of children's literature. The Little House series offered generations of children a glimpse into life on the nineteenth-century American prairie and immortalized a sod house on the banks of Minnesota's Plum Creek.

Wildwood Amusement Park

On the shores of White Bear Lake, Wildwood Amusement Park offered a dance pavilion, swimming, fishing, boating, picnic areas, amusement park rides, and carnival games. For only the cost of the streetcar fare, Twin Cities' residents could spend summer days at this park owned and operated by the Twin Cities Rapid Transit Corporation.

Wilkin, Alexander (1819–1864)

Alexander Wilkin was a St. Paul lawyer and businessman who served as secretary of Minnesota Territory. He was the highest ranking officer from Minnesota killed during the Civil War.

Wilkins, Roy (1901–1981)

Roy Wilkins, who spent his formative years in the Twin Cities, led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1949 to 1977. During those years, the NAACP helped achieve the greatest civil rights advancements in U.S. history. Wilkins favored new laws and legal challenges as the best ways for African Americans to gain civil rights.

Williamson, Jane Smith (1803–1895)

Jane Williamson was a schoolteacher and anti-slavery activist in Ohio before she came to the Presbyterian Dakota Mission at Lac qui Parle in 1843. She spent the remaining fifty-two years of her life working with Dakota people.

Willis, Dorsey (1886–1977)

On November 6, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 African American infantrymen from their battalion at Fort Brown when they refused to confess to committing acts of violence in Brownsville, Texas, riot three months earlier. Dorsey Willis, the last surviving member of this battalion, lived in Minneapolis from 1913 until he died in 1977. In 1972, his dishonorable discharge was changed to an honorable one, and with the help of Senator Hubert Humphrey, he was allowed a pension of $25,000.

Willmar 8 Bank Strike

For nearly two years, eight women employees of Willmar's Citizens National Bank, dubbed the Willmar 8, picketed in front of their downtown workplace seeking pay equity. They never got pay increases, they never got strike-related compensation, and after the strike, only one woman returned to work at the bank for more than a few months. But for the women's movement, the 1977-1979 strike was a resounding success. It opened a chink in the armor of the institutional sexism women faced in the workplace.

Willmar State Hospital

Originally structured as a small farm for the treatment of alcoholism, Willmar State Hospital expanded its client base and operations as conditions declined through the first half of the twentieth century. Following reforms in the 1950s, it introduced innovative treatments for alcohol and drug dependency, the “open-door” model of psychiatric care, and the physical rehabilitation of disabled people.

Windom Concert Series

Residents of Windom, a community in southwestern Minnesota with approximately 3,000 citizens, created a musical concert series in 1948. The series’ governing body, the Windom Concert Association, became one of the longest continually operating Minnesota organizations of its kind.

Winnipeg Liquor Conspiracy

National Prohibition went into effect January 17, 1920. On March 23—sixty-six days into Prohibition—federal liquor agents arrested Oscar Martinson, sheriff of Hennepin County. Next came William M. Nash, Hennepin County Attorney, indicted April 6, arrested May 13. Martinson pleaded guilty. Nash was acquitted, but Governor J. A. A. Burnquist removed him from office. Nash and Martinson were the highest-ranking Minnesota law enforcement officials prosecuted under Prohibition.

Winona Masonic Temple

Built in 1909, the Winona Masonic Temple with its large public ballroom and other meeting rooms was an important center of social and civic activity in the city. It continues to serve Winona in the twenty-first century.

Winona Normal School

The Winona Normal School was Minnesota’s first teacher-training school when it opened in 1860. The school fostered many innovations, including the state’s first “model school” program, a kind of laboratory school for training teachers. Over the years, the normal school evolved into a four-year state college and then into Winona State University.

Winona Public Library

In 1897, lumberman William Harris Laird offered to fund the designing and building of a library for the city of Winona. Two years later he presented this Classical Revival building to the library board. It is the oldest building in Minnesota built as a public library that continues to fulfill that function in the present day.

How Women Have Shaped the State

Women in Minnesota: Weaving the Web of Society in the North Star State

Rhoda R. Gilman, a founding member of Women Historians of the Midwest and a former candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, considers the influence of women in Minnesota: the Willmar 8, the Schubert Club, the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association, and much more.

Women Industrial Workers in the Twin Cities, 1860s–1945

For women to earn wage income in the 1800s, they first had to overcome the conventional, and often legal, strictures that led to the saying, “a woman’s place is in the home.” In the early twentieth century, technological and economic change—as well as two world wars—transformed the industrial workplace, and much of daily life. In Minnesota and throughout the US, the women’s suffrage movement overlapped with these changes and helped the campaign for economic and social equality, including the right to work.

Women on the World War I Home Front

After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Minnesota women, like Americans across the nation, were called to contribute to the war effort. Though some went to Europe and served as nurses, drivers, and aid workers on the battlefields, many more participated on the home front. They took on new jobs, conserved vital resources, and joined volunteer organizations. At the same time, they struggled to come to terms with conflicting ideals of patriotism, loyalty, and what it meant to be an American.

Wonderland Amusement Park

Only for only seven seasons, Wonderland Amusement Park brought thrills and sights from Coney Island to Minneapolis. With a roller coaster, fun house, shoot-the-chutes, miniature railroads for kids, a 120-foot lighted tower, and a display of premature babies in incubators, Wonderland drew crowds from all over Minnesota.

Woodbury House, Anoka

The Woodbury House is the second-oldest extant house in the city of Anoka. It served as a home to several families from the time of its construction until the mid-2000s. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. In 2020, it is owned by the City of Anoka and leased to the Mad Hatter Tea Room restaurant.

Workers Killed During State Capitol Construction, 1898–1903

Six workers were killed in accidents during the building of the third Minnesota State Capitol between 1898 and 1903. The deaths resulted from unsafe working conditions that labor laws have greatly improved since that time. After being nearly forgotten, the six builders were honored in 2011, 2012, and 2017 by ceremonies and a plaque at the capitol.

Works Progress Administration Strikes, 1939

In the summer of 1939, workers went on strike across the nation to protest budget cuts to the Works Progress Administration imposed by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. While they did not bring about the act’s repeal, they kept their jobs and were allowed to return to work after the strike. Minnesota was the only state in which strikers faced criminal charges for preventing people from working.

World Series, 1987

The 1987 World Series put the Minnesota Twins on the national map for the first time since their 1970 Western Division title. The Twins met the National League champion St. Louis Cardinals in what was called both the "Riverboat Series" (after the fact that both cities were connected by the Mississippi River) and the "Cinderella Series" (both clubs were considered underdogs in their respective leagues). The Twins went on to win the series, four games to three.

World's Largest Peace Pipe

The world's largest peace pipe began with a vision shared by three spiritual people: one Lakota and two Anishinaabe. The pipe stands on the grounds of the historic Rock Island Railroad depot near the entrance to the Pipestone National Monument, home to the Keepers of the Sacred Tradition of Pipemakers. The location of the giant peace pipe is significant; the pipestone quarry nearby is known as "the crossroads of the Indian world." The soft red stone from the quarry has been used by American Indians for thousands of years to create ceremonial peace pipes.

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