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#    Entered Union      Year Settled

32^nd           May 11, 1858        1805

 

Nickname

North Star State

 

Rank   Population

21^st            5,220,393

 

Rank   Square Miles

12^th            86,939

 

State Bird

Great Northern Diver

 

State Flower

Pink and White Lady's Slipper

 

State Tree

Red Pine

 

State Motto

L'étoile du Nord   Quae sursum volo videre (territorial motto)      The star of the North I long to see what is beyond     French     

 

The "Land of 10,000 Lakes," Minnesota got its nickname because there are more than 12,000 lakes throughout the state. Its name comes from the Dakota (Sioux) word for the Minnesota River's "sky-tinted waters." The Minnesota Territory was formed in 1849 from what had been part of the Northwest Territory, and Minnesota joined the Union in 1858. The capital is St. Paul.

 

Known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," Minnesota became the 32nd state in the Union on May 11, 1858. What makes this state important? For one, its waterways are vital to the state's and the nation's economies. Besides its quantity of lakes, it is the northernmost stop of the Mississippi River and the westernmost point of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which runs through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Despite the convenient access to the state, immigration was slow until the second half of the 19th century, when people in the east started to hear about Minnesota's woodlands and fertile prairie. Between 1850 and 1857, the state population skyrocketed from 6,077 to more than 150,000.

 

Long before that, the Ojibwa (Chippewa) and Dakota (Sioux) tribes made the land their home. For them state borders were nonexistent, so their territory extended well beyond what is today Minnesota. The French claimed the territory in the mid-1600s. It became U.S. territory through the Treaty of Paris (1783) and the Louisiana Purchase (1803)

 

Minnesota today is still a leader in farming, lumbering, and milling, as well as printing and iron production. Have you visited Minnesota? What do you know about its twin cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul? Ask your family and friends what they know about Minnesota, the "Land of 10,000 Lakes."

 

Logging in Minnesota

Think about how much wood you could fit into a train's freight car. Imagine how many wood logs you would need to fill up 240,000 cars. That's a lot of cars, but that's just how many were filled in Minnesota in 1905.

 

Historically, logging has been an important part of Minnesota's economy. Clearing the massive conifer forests of Minnesota continued into the first decades of the 20th century, when production peaked in 1905. In fact, so much lumber was sawed in the state that year that it would have filled about 240,000 freight cars! During the boom period of 1890 to 1910, lumber companies harvested lumber valued at $1 billion in Minnesota.

 

Each winter season, logging crews set up camps in the forest areas. The crews were made up of relatively poor and unskilled workers. Many of them were recent immigrants from northern Europe who were barely making a living. Workers received low wages and toiled long hours under dangerous conditions.

 

Technological advances changed and industrialized logging. Horses were replaced with small tractors, and loggers began to use gasoline-powered chain saws. Lumber was sent to paper mills that were built along the Mississippi, Rainy, and St. Louis rivers. By the 1970s, the industrialization of an agricultural industry was complete.

 

Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant

Have you read any of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder or seen the TV show "Little House on the Prairie"?

 

Laura Ingalls Wilder, well-known author of the Little House series of books, was born in the big woods of Wisconsin. When she was 7, she and her family traveled by covered wagon and moved to the prairie land of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Her family was one of the pioneer families who settled there, following the Homestead Act of 1862, which encouraged Americans to travel west and settle.

 

Today, the people of Walnut Grove celebrate Wilder's books every July with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant. The Pageant is a family-oriented outdoor drama with all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie book characters. An actress playing a 70-year-old Laura narrates the story, reflecting on her life in Walnut Grove during the 1870s. If you've never read any of the Little House books, you should, because you can learn a lot about life in America during the 1870s.

 

Ironworld Discovery Center

Why would a state need millions of trees? In Minnesota it was because much of the land had been mined for iron ore and was stripped bare of trees and other forms of nature.

 

So, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, a federal government program called the Civilian Conservation Corps planted more than 25 million trees in Minnesota. More than 4,000 men between the ages of 18 and 25 were hired for the project. In addition to the trees, the Corps workers built hundreds of miles of hiking trails, roads, and canoe ports that citizens have come to love.

 

Even though they planted trees to restore the land, Minnesota wanted to preserve the history of its iron ranges, so it established the Ironwood Discovery Center in Chisholm.

 

Open-pit mining was a big business in Minnesota until the mid-1970s. In 1900, the Mesabi Iron Range was the largest iron-mining area in the world, and during World War II, Minnesota produced more than 75 percent of the iron used in the war effort. As the iron deposits ran out, another form of mining replaced it, which extracts iron in a complicated mechanized process. The end of the open pits also spelled the end of a way of life for many Minnesotans. The Discovery Center helps people learn about that period.