William James Mayo is born in Le Sueur. As an adult he joined the medical practice of his father, William Worrall Mayo, leading to the creation with his brother Charles of the Mayo Clinic.

Chisholm's Archibald "Moonlight" Graham plays his only game as a major leaguer, with the New York Giants. He was later celebrated in W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, translated to the screen as Field of Dreams.

John W. Vessey Jr. is born in Minneapolis. Vessey lied about his age to join the Minnesota National Guard in 1939. In World War II he fought in North Africa and at Anzio, Italy, where he won a Bronze Star and earned a battlefield commission as an officer. He won a Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam and served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1985.

Forty-seven soldiers at Fort Snelling are confined to the guardhouse for violating orders about visiting the saloon of Henry Menk, near modern Fort Road and Munster Avenue, in St. Paul.

Forty miners on the Mesabi Iron Range walk off the job at the start of a massive strike, coordinated by the ethnically diverse rank and file, with help from experienced organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Scab workers undermine the strike, and the strikers concede defeat after three and a half months.

Duluth's Ed Hommer is the first double amputee to reach the top of Mount McKinley (20,320 feet). He had lost his legs to frostbite after a plane crash on the mountain in 1981.

Alexander McDougall launches the first whaleback freighter onto Lake Superior.

John S. and Charles A. Pillsbury buy a third interest in the Frazee and Murphy Flour Mill. The Pillsbury Company marks this date as its birthday.

A statue is unveiled in Periers, Normandy (France), of four American soldiers who died trying to free the town from the Germans during World War II. Citizens of the town and veterans of the Ninetieth Division raised funds for the monument. Two Minnesotans are commemorated in the statue: Virgil Tangborn of Bemidji and Richard Richtman of Minneapolis. It is unusual for statues dedicated to the memory of common soldiers to be of specific individuals.

A delegation of German Mennonites from Russia arrives in St. Paul to assess the state for settlement. Mennonite settler-colonists soon establish homesteads around Mountain Lake in Cottonwood County.

Twenty-one French soldiers and voyageurs are killed in a fight with an allied group of Dakota, Ojibwe, and Teton Lakota on an island in the Lake of the Woods. The men were part of a post set up by Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye.