Richard W. Sears is born in Stewartville, Minnesota. While a railroad freight agent in Redwood Falls, he bought an unclaimed shipment of watches and sold them through the mail at bargain prices. From this mail-order idea developed the A. C. Roebuck and Company, housed on the seventh floor of the Globe Building in Minneapolis. Renamed Sears, Roebuck and Co., the business was eventually headquartered in Chicago.

A runaway wagon strikes a streetcar traveling down Walnut Street on St. Paul's Ramsey Hill, causing the streetcar to lose control and rocket to the bottom of the hill. Surprisingly, given the hill's steep incline, there are no injuries.

Minnesota's Jeannette Piccard, who had once piloted hydrogen balloons into the stratosphere, is one of the first women to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

The state's first rail shipment of iron ore, from the Soudan Mine, arrives in Two Harbors.

Kidnappers abduct Virginia Piper, wife of investment banker Harry C. Piper, Jr., from her home. The Minneapolis woman is released near Duluth after a ransom of one million dollars is paid, at the time the highest such payment ever made.

Alexander Ramsey, who had served as governor during the Civil War, sets the cornerstone of the third state capitol building. Designed by Cass Gilbert, the capitol is a memorial to Minnesota's Civil War soldiers.

A bicycle built for thirteen―requiring twelve people to peddle and one person to steer―tours St. Paul at the height of the 1890s bicycling craze.

Governor Elmer Benson refuses to give a business license to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a notorious union-busting group.

Pierre Bottineau, the "Kit Carson of the Northwest," dies. Bottineau, the son of an Ojibwe woman and a French fur trader was born in the Red River valley about 1817. Fluent in Ojibwe, French, Dakota, and English, he worked for Henry H. Sibley in the fur trade beginning in 1837.

Almost eight inches of rain falls in St. Paul in a twenty-four-hour period, causing Lake Como to rise fourteen inches.