This week in state history

Historic Minnesota events with anniversaries this week.

March 22

1882 A guilty verdict on several counts is rendered in the impeachment trial of Judge Eugene St. Julien Cox of St. Peter, who had been accused of conducting a trial while drunk. His cause was not helped when bartenders were called to testify to his ability to hold liquor. Cox was removed from office, but his allies in the Democratic Party later helped reverse the conviction in 1891. St. Julien Cox was one of the earliest settlers of St. Peter. He was an attorney, St. Peter's first mayor, and a representative in the legislature, serving as a representative and senator. He then became a roving district judge. One historian called St. Julien Cox a "frontier eccentric." He was known for sleeping on the bench, playing violin during attorney presentations, and taking newly-convicted defendants out for a beer before they got locked up. He died in California in 1898. His home in St. Peter, built in 1871, has been preserved and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

1908 Maurice H. Stans is born in Shakopee. He would serve as secretary of commerce under President Richard M. Nixon, resigning in 1972 amid the Watergate scandal. Stans was linked but solid proof never surfaced, to illegal fundraising for Nixon. He died in 1998.

1958 Movie producer Mike Todd, who won a best picture Oscar for "Around the World in 80 Days" in 1956, dies in an airplane crash in New Mexico. Todd was born to Polish immigrant parents in Minneapolis in 1909 as Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen. He was the third of Elizabeth Taylor's seven husbands, and is the only one whom she did not divorce. He died just a year after the marriage.

2002 Gov. Jesse Ventura signs a law designating the image known as "Grace" the official state photograph. The photograph was taken by Swedish American photographer Eric Enstrom in 1918. It depicts an elderly man bowing his head and giving thanks. Enstrom took the photo in 1918 at his studio in Bovey, on the Iron Range. The man in the photo is Charles Wilden, a peddler from Grand Rapids who came to the studio to sell shoe scrapers. "There was something about the old gentleman's face," Enstrom would say decades later after the photo gained worldwide appeal. Augsburg Publishing House purchased the rights to the photo in the 1930s. In the 1940s, his daughter, Rhoda Nyberg, colorized the photo by hand and prints produced since have become the more widespread version of what became known nationally as the "Thanksgiving" photo.

March 23

1860Convicted of poisoning her husband, Stanislaus, Ann Bilansky is executed in St. Paul. Bilansky would be the only woman and the first white person to be legally executed in the state, although serious doubts about her guilt still persist. The state abolished capital punishment in 1911.

March 24

1858 The printing press of the St. Cloud Visiter is destroyed by a mob. The paper's editor, Jane Grey Swisshelm, a feminist and abolitionist, had angered local businessman and slave owner Sylvanus B. Lowry. Swisshelm soon obtains a new press and prints the story of her press's destruction and the names of the culprits, which results in a libel case and the termination of the paper. A week later she begins publishing the St. Cloud Democrat , which she runs for eight years.

1999 The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the rights of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe to fish and hunt in ceded lands without state regulation, as dictated by an 1837 treaty.

March 25

1886 The inaugural issue of the Progress is published at the White Earth Indian Reservation (Ojibwe). The first English-language paper to be published on an Indian reservation, the Progress is edited by missionaries Gus H. and Theodore H. Beaulieu. The second issue is not published until October 8, 1887, because of interference by an Indian agent who was concerned about the intentions of the paper, in which the Office of Indian Affairs was often criticized.

This column is derived from MNopedia.org and developed by the Minnesota Historical Society and its partners.