This week in state history

Historic Minnesota events that took place Sept. 6-12:

Sept. 6

1889 Bob Younger dies in the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, where he was serving a life sentence for his role in the Jesse James/Cole Younger gang’s Northfield bank raid on Sept. 7, 1876. First National Bank bookkeeper Joseph Lee Heywood delays the robbery by refusing to open the vault and pays with his life. A gunfight in the streets of Northfield follows; two of the robbers die and two more are wounded in the fight. A posse catches up with the gang at Madelia a few days later, killing one additional member and capturing all three of the infamous Younger brothers, Cole, Bob, and Jim — all sentenced to life in prison. Two of the gang members escaped. As the Younger brothers often worked with Frank and Jesse James, it was assumed that they took part in the crime, but their part in the failed robbery has never been proven.

Sept. 7

1885 Minnesota celebrates its first Labor Day. The state legislature would declare the first Monday in September a legal holiday in 1893. It became a national holiday the next year. Cloquet and Carlton County first publicly celebrated Labor Day in 1917.

1885 The Minnesota State Fair first opens on its present grounds. The area was in St. Paul at the time and later part of Falcon Heights. The Twin Cities had battled about which one would host the fair, but Ramsey County’s donation of two hundred acres for a permanent fairgrounds clinched St. Paul’s victory. The site had been part of the Ramsey County poor farm.

Sept. 8

1906 The celebrated trotting horse Dan Patch paces a mile in 1:55 at the State Fair, setting a world record.

Sept. 9

1861 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 the Duluth Depot complex.

Sept. 10

1934 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.

Sept. 11

1971 The first Minnesota Renaissance Festival opens at Lake Grace in Jonathan. One of the largest of its kind, the festival now operates from a permanent encampment near Shakopee.

This column is derived from MNopedia, an online project that has a “This Day in Minnesota History” feature on its website, mnopedia.org. Developed by the Minnesota Historical Society and its partners, it is a free, curated, and authoritative resource about state history. The information here is culled from “The Minnesota Book of Days,” published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.