The Minnesota territorial legislature votes to make St. Paul the capital and to build a prison in Stillwater.

Duluth's Accordionaires, a group of twenty-four accordion players, give a triumphal concert in their hometown. Organized in 1950, the group had performed around the world, including stops in Japan and the Soviet Union.

Redwood County is established and named after the Redwood River (Ċaŋṡayapi Wakpa in the Dakota language). Previously part of Brown County, this territory would later become, in addition to Redwood, the counties of Lac qui Parle, Lincoln, Lyon, and Yellow Medicine.

The Citizens League is formed in Minneapolis. An independent, non-partisan organization, the league involves citizens in studying public issues and developing policy solutions at the local, metropolitan, and state levels.

Senator William B. Dean offers a resolution in the Minnesota Senate recommending that the "wild lady-slipper or moccasin flower, Cypripedium calceolus, be named the state flower." The resolution is later adopted by both Senate and House. Following the discovery that this species of lady slipper does not grow in Minnesota, a new resolution would be adopted in 1902, changing the state flower to the pink-and-white lady slipper (Cypripedium reginae).

The Reverend William T. Boutwell is born in Lyndeborough, New Hampshire. In 1832 he accompanied Henry R. Schoolcraft on the trip, guided by the Ojibwe leader and agokwa Ozaawindib, that confirmed Lake Itasca as the source of the Mississippi River. Boutwell supplied the Latin words from which Schoolcraft named the lake (veritas, truth, and caput, head).

Forty-one iron-ore miners drown or are fatally buried in mud and seven more escape by climbing a ladder during the Milford Mine Disaster, which occurs north of Crosby on the Cuyuna Range in northern Minnesota when a nearby lake suddenly empties into an underground mining operation. A county inspector, who had visited the mine the week before the accident, would later state that every precaution had been taken and that the flooding was unavoidable.

Wendell R. Anderson is born in St. Paul. A member of the silver-medal-winning 1956 US Olympic ice hockey team, a lawyer, and a former legislator (in both House and Senate), he served as governor from 1971 to 1976. After helping to establish a firmer control on state finances through the "Minnesota Miracle" fiscal reforms of 1971, Anderson ended his career as an elected official by appointing himself to fill the US Senate seat of Walter Mondale following Mondale's election as vice president of the United States in November 1976.

The Northwestern Publishing Company is incorporated in St. Paul as a general job order printing office, with the subsidiary enterprise of publishing the Western Appeal (which became the Appeal in 1889), a weekly African American newspaper that had first appeared in 1885. Editor John Quincy Adams later called it a "National Afro-American Newspaper" and intended it to be a bold and active publication that would represent people marginalized by their race.

St. Paul's first Winter Carnival opens, hosting competitions in curling, skating, and ice polo and boasting the first ice palace in the United States. Built in Central Park, the palace is 140 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 100 feet high.