July 23, 2018 At 7:30 in the morning, more than 1700 milling employees and their family, friends, and supporters, gathered in Minneapolis, picnics in hand, to board special trains that would carry them to Lake Minnetonka for the fourth annual Head [...]
September 27, 2017 A Tale of an Extraordinary Ship and an Ordinary Bowl The USS Monitor was the first ironclad ship, and although it did not have a long life, it left quite a legacy. In fact, Winston Churchill stated, "The [...]
August 15, 2017 Above: one of two copy presses in the Hennepin History Museum collection. The letter copying press was invented in 1780 by the Scotsman James Watt, also the inventor of the steam engine. Watt's machine eliminated the need for laborious [...]
June 28, 2017 Many people today have heard of the famous African American Buffalo Soldiers, but did you know that the Buffalo Soldiers were based here in Minnesota during the 1880s? This photograph, part of Hennepin History Museum's archival collection, shows [...]
June 19, 2017 The Minnesota frontier could be a frightening place to have an illness by today’s standards. Travel was slow, medical education was unregulated, and medicines were often limited to what you could make with the plants at hand. Many [...]
March 6, 2017 In the late 1800s, Hennepin County was home to a population of African Americans who had moved north to find opportunity after the Civil War, along with those who had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. While many [...]
January 18, 2017 On a cold day in January 1876, Mahala Fisk Pillsbury of Minneapolis, a prominent community member and philanthropist, took on a new title: Minnesota’s First Lady. Her husband of twenty years, businessman John Sargent Pillsbury, had just been [...]
December 13, 2016 By Mara Taft, collections volunteer This chair was used by Franklin Steele (1813-1880), a founder of Minneapolis and prominent in the lumber industry. Stylistically, this a bentwood chair with a cane bottom. Manufactured by the Thonet company in [...]
