The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opens alongside the Walker Art Center. Designed by modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes in collaboration with landscape architect Peter Rothschild, it is the home of the famous Spoonbridge and Cherry by Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg.

Baseball slugger Roger Maris is born in Hibbing. In 1961 he would hit sixty-one home runs for the Yankees, breaking Babe Ruth's single season record, which had stood for thirty-four years. Maris's record would be broken thirty-seven years later by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

In the Civil War, the Third Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment is involved in the capture of Little Rock, Arkansas. A painting of their entry into the city hangs in the governor's office in the state capitol.

Colonel Josiah Snelling lays the cornerstone of Fort St. Anthony, which would later bear his name as Fort Snelling. Snelling had chosen to build a stone fort rather than the typical wooden structure, in part because there was not enough wood available in the immediate area and in part because the fort was to sit on a limestone bluff.

Judge Charles E. Flandrau dies in St. Paul. Settler-colonists admired him for his role in the defense of New Ulm during the US–Dakota War of 1862.

Joe Hauser hits two home runs for the Minneapolis Millers minor league baseball team, setting an American Association record of sixty-nine homers in a season. Hauser had also set the International League record mark at sixty-three, with the Baltimore Orioles in 1930.

A tornado strikes the lumber mill at Marine on St. Croix, blowing away a million board-feet of cut lumber.

In Faribault, five students attend the first classes held at the Minnesota School for the Deaf.

The steamboat Alhambra, towing a barge carrying railroad track, cars, and the locomotive William Crooks, arrives in St. Paul. Operation of William Crooks, the first steam locomotive in the state, begins on June 28, 1862, with a trip to St. Anthony. The locomotive, named for the chief engineer of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, now rests at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth.

A group of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) unhappy with the new Long Prairie Reservation in Minnesota, attempt to return to their homeland in Wisconsin. Troops from Fort Snelling block their movements near St. Paul.