This week in state history

Historic Minnesota events with anniversaries this coming week.

Dec. 6

1815 Abolitionist, feminist, and newspaper publisher Jane Grey Swisshelm is born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She would move to Minnesota in 1857 and establish the St. Cloud Visiter and, later, the St. Cloud Democrat. During the Civil War she would move to Washington, D.C. and become a nurse before founding one last newspaper. She died in 1884.

Dec. 7

1863 Richard W. Sears is born in Stewartville. While a railroad freight agent in Redwood Falls, he would buy an unclaimed shipment of watches and sell them through the mail at bargain prices. From this mail-order idea would develop the A. C. Roebuck and Company, housed on the seventh floor of the Globe Building in Minneapolis. Renamed Sears, Roebuck and Co., the business would eventually be headquartered in Chicago.

1941 Outside of Pearl Harbor, the destroyer Ward, its crew primarily reservists from St. Paul, attacks and sinks a Japanese midget submarine, the first shots fired on the date of infamy. Inside the harbor, Minneapolis-born Captain Franklin van Valkenburgh is killed on the bridge of his ship, the USS Arizona. He would be awarded the Medal of Honor by Congress.

Dec. 10

1930 Sauk Centre’s Sinclair Lewis receives the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American so honored. His popular titles include “Main Street,” “Arrowsmith,” “Elmer Gantry”, and “Babbitt.”

1966 James Arness, a Minneapolis native famous for his role as marshal Matt Dillon in the western series Gunsmoke, appears on the cover of TV Guide.

Dec. 11

1956 The dwellings in Swede Hollow, a St. Paul immigrant neighborhood, are burned after the city health department declares them contaminated.

1999 After 16 months of often bitter protest, four oak trees sacred to the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community are cut down to make way for the rerouting of Highway 55 in Minneapolis.

Dec. 12

1928 The newly finished Foshay Tower, which would be Minneapolis’s tallest building for nearly 50 years, is strung with lights and lit up like a Christmas tree.

This column is derived from MNopedia, an online project at mnopedia.org. and developed by the Minnesota Historical Society and its partners.