Hans Mattson is born in Sweden. An advocate for Swedish immigration to Minnesota, he would establish the Vasa colony in Goodhue County in 1853. He would serve as colonel of the Third Minnesota Regiment during the Civil War and as US consul general in India from 1881 to 1883. In 1877 he would found the Swedish newspaper Minnesota Stats Tidning (Minnesota State Times).

Minnesota celebrates George Washington's birthday as a legal holiday for the first time.

Henderson is incorporated. Joseph R. Brown had settled there in 1852 and later named the town for his aunt, Margaret Brown Henderson, and her son, Andrew.

The Minnesota legislature reorganizes the University of Minnesota into a central college of science, literature, and the arts, with various associated colleges. Although the university had been incorporated on February 25, 1851, no classes had been held. In 1869, the board of regents elected William W. Folwell as the institution's first president, and classes began soon afterward.

Charles J. Rinehart, accused of murdering carpenter John B. Bodell, is lynched in Lexington. His case had not yet been brought to trial.

Sister Mary Giovanni Gourhan, founder in 1963 of Guadalupe Area Project alternative school, dies. A native of West St. Paul active in that neighborhood's Chicano community, Gourhan ran an unorthodox school, teaching the basics as well as Mexican history and effective living and meditation techniques.

Thirty-eight Dakota men, convicted of crimes committed during the US-Dakota War, are hanged by the federal government in Mankato. Their trials were brief and carried out with little legal authority. It was the largest mass execution in American history.

Citizens of Minneapolis are shocked when the body of the year's ninth murder victim is found. There had been only one murder the previous year.

A fierce fire discovered shortly after 2:00 A.M. at the School for the Feeble-Minded in Faribault badly damages the main building and causes the safe evacuation of more than 300 people who had been sleeping in the structure. Unable to get their ladder wagon to the school, local firemen drag a hose through the building and up four flights of stairs to the attic and bring the flames under control.

Norman E. Borlaug, University of Minnesota alumnus and crop researcher, receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his research in hybridizing wheat to increase crop yields. Borlaug is known as the father of the green revolution.