Many Americans can recognize a Bundt pan or have one at home. But few know that this iconic cake pan, created by H. David Dalquist, founder of the Nordic Ware Company, is rooted in Minnesota’s Jewish immigrant history. The design for the ring-shaped mold came from a pan called the Gugelhupf, which was brought to the United States by Jewish immigrants from Europe.

In the fall of 1925, a series of six signs advertising Burma-Shave, a new brushless shaving cream, appeared for the first time along highway 65 from Minneapolis to Albert Lea and on highway 61 to Red Wing. The signs began an advertising phenomenon using clever rhyming jingles that lasted into the 1960s, including: “Your shaving brush / has had its day, / so why not / shave the modern way / with Burma-Shave?”

Early generations of Minnesotans lived with the ever-present danger of fire. Many city histories tell of blazes that destroyed whole sections of their communities, but in most cases arson was not the cause. The Red Wing Mills complex, however, was almost certainly burned deliberately by an unknown arsonist.

The Business and Professional Women’s Foundation (BPW/USA) was started in 1919 to improve job conditions and raise pay rates for working women. At the first meeting of the foundation’s Crookston chapter in 1921, over 100 women gathered. In its early years, the club donated volunteer time and money to local causes, including the Camp Fire Girls, Crookston’s Drum and Bugle Corps, and milk and medical aid for needy school children.

Small Jewish communities arose at the turn of the twentieth century in several southern Minnesota market towns. In each, Jews gathered for religious purposes. But it was only in Rochester that a formal synagogue, B’nai Israel, was established. The founding of Mayo Clinic in 1905 created a need for a local congregation that could serve Jewish patients. After almost a century of holding worship services in former residences, B’nai Israel built its first synagogue building in 2008.

The Cadotte Post was a fur trade encampment in the late eighteenth century—one of three archaeological sites in Wadena County identified through Ojibwe oral tradition as a late-1700s trading fort. It stood just north of the Crow Wing River on its east bank, south and opposite the mouth of the Leaf River in what later became the Old Wadena County Park.

In September of 2010, the Minnesota Twins unveiled a memorial to highlight Calvin Griffith, their first owner. While Griffith is credited with bringing professional baseball to Minneapolis, his racist attitudes and actions outshine his accomplishments. In response to increasing public pressure following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the statue was removed in June of 2020.

Buildings along the main streets of Minnesota's earliest communities were particularly vulnerable to fire. Even small blazes could grow quickly and incinerate wood-frame structures in densely packed business districts. The 1880s fires in Cannon Falls serve as an example.

In the mid-twentieth century, Anoka County's Carlos Avery Game Farm helped to build populations of dwindling game bird species, such as the bob white quail, chukar partridge, and ring-necked pheasant. A National Register-listed historic district since 1991, it is now part of the nearly 25,000-acre Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area (WMA) and has become a reserve for deer, waterfowl, and other woodland animals and birds.

The Carson Mennonite Brethren Cemetery, surveyed and platted in June 1900, has 185 recorded burials as of 2017. Some graves have been relocated from other sites.

Carver County, founded in 1855, is home to the Minnesota and Crow Rivers, along with 125 lakes. Located southwest of the Twin Cities, it is part of the seven-county metro area.