St. Croix County, Wisconsin Territory, is given a parcel of land in Stillwater for a county courthouse. Finished in 1849, the building is the first courthouse in what is now Minnesota.

Governor Orville L. Freeman appoints L. Howard Bennett to a municipal judgeship in Minneapolis, making him the first African American judge appointed in Minnesota.

Koochiching County is established. Ojibwe and Cree people had long used the word "Koochiching" to refer to multiple bodies of water (including the one eventually called Rainy Lake by Europeans and Americans).

The Pillsbury Company announces that it has accepted a $5.7 billion buy-out offer from the British food and liquor conglomerate Grand Metropolitan PLC.

In a milestone in the history of health and medicine in Minnesota, Mary Lund is the first woman to receive a Jarvik-7 artificial heart, in Minneapolis. The device keeps her alive for about a month, until she receives a real heart via transplant.

The Northwestern Telephone Exchange begins operating in Faribault, with forty customers.

The newly finished Foshay Tower, already an icon of architecture in Minnesota, is strung with lights and lit up like a Christmas tree. It was Minneapolis's tallest building for nearly fifty years,

After sixteen month of often bitter protest, four oak trees sacred to the Mdewakanton Dakota community of Mendota are cut down to make way for the rerouting of Highway 55 in Minneapolis.

St. Paul native Paul Molitor announces his retirement from baseball, having spent his final three seasons with the Minnesota Twins. His career hits numbered over 3,000, most of them from his years with the Milwaukee Brewers.

William Windom is born in Belmont City, Ohio. After settling in Winona in 1855, Windom represented Minnesota in the US Congress as both a congressman and a senator. He later served as secretary of the treasury under Presidents James A. Garfield and Benjamin Harrison. His likeness appears on the 1891 two-dollar bill, and Windom in Cottonwood County is named for him. He died in 1891.