One of Minnesota’s most celebrated early aviators, Charles “Speed” Holman, looks on as passengers board his Northwest Airways plane, ca. 1929. Photo by Northwest Airlines, Inc.

An airplane piloted by Alexander T. Heine flies over Minneapolis, 1913. In that year, Heine became the first person to fly a plane over downtown Minneapolis.

Horses pulling a car out of mud on a dirt road. Photograph by Kenneth Melvin Wright, ca. 1927. Minnesotans advocated for better roads in the 1920s and beyond.

Harold Sturgis (seated at left) and his electric automobile (one of the first automobiles used in Minnesota) draw a crowd outside the West Hotel, Minneapolis, 1896.

St. Paul’s first electric streetcar line opens on Grand Avenue, February 22, 1890. Photo by Eclipse View Company.

Advertisement for the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway, a predecessor of James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, with the recently completed Stone Arch Bridge in the foreground, 1885.

One of the first steam locomotives in Minnesota: the Shakopee of the Minnesota Valley Railroad Company, ca. 1868. Photo by William H. Jacoby.

The steamer City of St. Louis on Lake Minnetonka, ca. 1885. Photo by William H. Jacoby.

The whaleback Christopher Columbus in Duluth harbor, ca. 1885.

Red Wing, War Eagle, and an unidentified steamboat at the St. Paul levee, ca. 1875.