The former Greyhound bus station in Minneapolis opens its doors as a music club, the Depot. Twelve years later it would be renamed First Avenue by Steve McClellan, the booking agent of the club, and Jack Meyers, the club's financial manager. A cornerstone of the city's music scene, First Avenue hosted local and national acts and was featured in Prince's movie Purple Rain.

Troops from the U.S. Sixth Infantry begin constructing Fort Ridgely, having arrived from Fort Snelling on the steamer West Newton the previous evening. The fort is built near the Dakota reservation in the Minnesota River valley and would be a focal point during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis names the fort for three Ridgelys who were killed in the Mexican War.

In his first home run for the Minnesota Twins baseball team, Harmon Killebrew hits the ball 467 feet.

Abram Elfelt, one of the first Jewish people to make a permanent home in Minnesota, dies.

Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser, founder of the timber dynasty, dies in California. At one time he owned two million acres of forestland in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Pacific Northwest.

Minnesota goes dry! The citizens of the territory approve a prohibition bill by a vote of 853 to 662. The measure, which would have outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, is declared unconstitutional in November.

Richard Eberhart is born in Austin. A poet and teacher, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems: 1930–1965 in 1966.

The People's Lobby occupies part of the state capitol while demonstrating for a depression relief bill. Two hundred protestors heckle legislators and spend the night in the senate chamber.

The first known baptism in the upper Mississippi River occurs in St. Paul. Schoolteacher Harriet E. Bishop had written the Baptist Home Missionary Society requesting a preacher, and the Reverend J. P. Parsons arrived in May 1849. The First Baptist Church was organized soon after, holding meetings in the schoolhouse on Jackson Street.

In the Metrodome's first regular-season baseball game, the Minnesota Twins lose to the Seattle Mariners, 11-7.

The St. Paul post office is established in Henry Jackson's store.

A warrant is issued for the arrest of Joseph Friedman, operator of the Tower Theater in St. Paul, where he had shown clips of the Dempsey-Gibbons boxing match. Tommy Gibbons, a St. Paulite who later became Ramsey County sheriff, went fifteen rounds with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey in Montana on July 4, 1923. Because boxing was illegal in some states at this time, interstate shipment of such pictures was outlawed, and Friedman would be charged with "receiving and exhibiting fight films in violation of Federal law."