The story
Founded by John H. Stevens in 1850.1
History
Dakota homeland
Two Indigenous nations inhabited the area now called Minneapolis. Archaeologists have evidence that since 1000 AD, they were the Dakota (one half of the Sioux nation), and, after the 1700s, the Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa, members of the Anishinaabe nations). Dakota people have different stories to explain their creation. One widely accepted story says the Dakota emerged from Bdóte, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Dakota are the only inhabitants of the Minneapolis area who claimed no other land; they have no traditions of having immigrated. In 1680, cleric Louis Hennepin, who was probably the first European to see the Minneapolis waterfall the Dakota people call Owámniyomni, renamed it the Falls of St. Anthony of Padua for his patron saint.
In the space of sixty years, the US seized all of the Dakota land and forced them out of their homeland. Purchasing most of modern-day Minneapolis, Zebulon Pike made the 1805 Treaty of St. Peter with the Dakota. Pike bought a 9-square-mile (23 km2) strip of land—coinciding with the sacred place of Dakota origin—on the Mississippi south of Saint Anthony Falls, with the agreement the US would build a military fort and trading post there and the Dakota would retain their usufructuary rights. In 1819, the US Army built Fort Snelling to direct Native American trade away from British-Canadian traders and to deter war between the Dakota and Ojibwe in northern Minnesota. Under pressure from US officials in a series of treaties, the Dakota ceded their land first to the east and then to the west of the Mississippi, the river that runs through Minneapolis. Dakota leaders twice refused to sign the next treaty until they were paid for the previous one. In the decades following these treaty signings, the federal US government rarely honored their terms. At the beginning of the American Civil War, annuity payments owed in June 1862 to the Dakota by treaty were late, causing acute hunger among the Dakota. Facing starvation a faction of the Dakota declared war in August and killed settlers. Serving without any prior military experience, US commander Henry Sibley commanded raw recruits, volunteer mounted troops from Minneapolis and Saint Paul with no military experience. The war went on for six weeks in the Minnesota River valley. After a kangaroo court, 38 Dakota men were hanged. The army force-marched 1,700 non-hostile Dakota men, women, children, and elders 150 miles (240 km) to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Minneapolitans reportedly threatened more than once to attack the camp. In 1863, the US "abrogated and annulled" all treaties with the Dakota. With Governor Alexander Ramsey calling for their extermination, most Dakota were exiled from Minnesota.
While the Dakota were being expelled, Franklin Steele laid claim to the east bank of Saint Anthony Falls, and John H. Stevens built a home on the west bank. In the Dakota language, the city's name is Bde Óta Othúŋwe ('Many Lakes Town'). Residents had divergent ideas on names for their community. Charles Hoag proposed combining the Dakota word for 'water' (mni) with the Greek word for 'city' (polis), yielding Minneapolis. In 1851, after a meeting of the Minnesota Territorial Legislature, leaders of east bank St. Anthony lost their bid to move the capital from Saint Paul, but they eventually won the state university. In 1856, the territorial legislature authorized Minneapolis as a town on the Mississippi's west bank. Minneapolis was incorporated as a city in 1867, and in 1872, it merged with St. Anthony.
Industries develop
Minneapolis originated around a source of energy: Saint Anthony Falls, the only natural waterfall on the Mississippi. Each of the city's two founding industries—flour and lumber milling—developed in the 19th century nearly concurrently, and each came to prominence for about fifty years. In 1884, the value of Minneapolis flour milling was the world's highest. In 1899, Minneapolis outsold every other lumber market in the world. Through its expanding mill industries, Minneapolis earned the nickname "Mill City". Due to the occupational hazards of milling, six companies manufactured artificial limbs.
Disasters struck in the late 19th century: the Eastman tunnel under the river leaked in 1869; twice, fire destroyed the entire row of sawmills on the east bank; an explosion of flour dust at the Washburn A mill killed eighteen people and demolished about half the city's milling capacity; and in 1893, fire spread from Nicollet Island to Boom Island to northeast Minneapolis, destroyed twenty blocks, and killed two people.
The lumber industry was built around forests in northern Minnesota, largely by lumbermen emigrating from Maine's depleting forests. The region's waterways were used to transport logs well after railroads developed; the Mississippi River carried logs to St. Louis until the early 20th century. In 1871, of the thirteen mills sawing lumber in St. Anthony, eight ran on water power, and five ran on steam power. Auxiliary businesses on the river's west bank included woolen mills, iron works, a railroad machine shop, and mills for cotton, paper, sashes, and wood-planing. Minneapolis supplied the materials for farmsteads and settlement of rapidly expanding cities on the prairies that lacked wood. White pine milled in Minneapolis built Miles City, Montana; Bismarck, North Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Omaha, Nebraska; and Wichita, Kansas. Growing use of steam power freed lumbermen and their sawmills from dependence on the falls. Lumbering's decline began around the turn of the century, and sawmills in the city including the Weyerhauser mill closed by 1919. After depleting Minnesota's white pine, some lumbermen moved on to Douglas fir in the Pacific Northwest.
In 1877, Cadwallader C. Washburn co-founded Washburn-Crosby, the flour-milling company that became General Mills. Washburn and partner John Crosby sent Austrian civil engineer William de la Barre to Hungary where he acquired innovations through industrial espionage. De la Barre calculated and managed the power at the falls and encouraged steam for auxiliary power. C. A. Pillsbury Company across the river hired Washburn-Crosby employees and began using the new methods. Wheat farming developed west across the Great Plains, from Minnesota, to the Dakotas and Montana, and new rail lines connected these farmers to the Minneapolis mills, reciprocally spurring further expansion. The hard red spring wheat grown in Minnesota became valuable, and Minnesota "patent" flour was recognized at the time as the best bread flour in the world. In 1900, fourteen percent of America's grain was milled in Minneapolis and about one third of that was shipped overseas. Overall production peaked at 18.5 million barrels in 1916. Decades of soil exhaustion, stem rust, and changes in freight tariffs combined to quash the city's flour industry. In the 1920s, Washburn-Crosby and Pillsbury developed new milling centers in Buffalo, New York, and Kansas City, Missouri, while maintaining their headquarters in Minneapolis. The falls became a national historic district, and the upper St. Anthony lock and dam was permanently closed to traffic. The city announced that in accordance with a 2020 act of Congress, ownership of 5 acres (2.0 hectares) of federal land around the falls will transfer in 2027 to a Dakota-led nonprofit Owámniyomni Okhódayapi.
Columnist Don Morrison says that after the milling era waned a "modern, major city" emerged. Around 1900, Minneapolis attracted skilled workers who leveraged expertise from the University of Minnesota. In 1923, Munsingwear was the world's largest manufacturer of underwear. Frederick McKinley Jones invented mobile refrigeration in Minneapolis, and with his associate founded Thermo King in 1938. In 1949, Medtronic was founded in a Minneapolis garage. Minneapolis-Honeywell built a south Minneapolis campus where their experience regulating control systems earned them military contracts for the Norden bombsight and the C-1 autopilot. In 1957, Control Data began in downtown Minneapolis, where in the CDC 1604 computer they replaced vacuum tubes with transistors. A highly successful business until disbanded in 1990, Control Data opened a facility in economically depressed north Minneapolis, bringing jobs and good publicity. A University of Minnesota computing group released Gopher in 1991; three years later, the World Wide Web superseded Gopher traffic.
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Social tensions
In many ways, the 20th century in Minneapolis was a difficult time of bigotry and malfeasance, beginning with four decades of corruption. Known initially as a kindly physician, mayor Doc Ames made his brother police chief, ran the city into crime, and tried to leave town in 1902. The Ku Klux Klan was a force in the city from 1921 until 1923. The gangster Kid Cann engaged in bribery and intimidation between the 1920s and the 1940s.
During the summer of 1934 and the financial downturn of the Great Depression, the Citizens' Alliance, an association of employers, refused to negotiate with teamsters. The truck drivers union executed strikes in May and July–August. Charles Rumford Walker said that Minneapolis teamsters succeeded in part due to the "military precision of the strike machine". The union victory ultimately led to 1935 and 1938 federal laws protecting workers' rights.
From the end of World War I in 1918 until 1950, antisemitism was commonplace in Minneapolis—Carey McWilliams called the city the antisemitic capital of the US. Starting in 1936, a fascist hate group known as the Silver Shirts held meetings in the city. In the 1940s, mayor Hubert Humphrey worked to rescue the city's reputation and helped the city establish the country's first municipal fair employment practices and a human-relations council that interceded on behalf of minorities. However, the lives of Black people had not been improved. In 1966 and 1967—years of significant turmoil across the US—suppressed anger among the Black population was released in two disturbances on Plymouth Avenue. Historian Iric Nathanson says young Blacks confronted police, arson caused property damage, and "random gunshots" caused minor injuries in what was a "relatively minor incident" in Minneapolis compared to the loss of life and property in similar incidents in Detroit and Newark. A coalition reached a peaceful outcome but again failed to solve Black poverty and unemployment. In the wake of unrest and voter backlash, Charles Stenvig, a law-and-order candidate, became mayor in 1969, and governed for almost a decade.
Disparate events defined the second half of the 20th century. Between 1958 and 1963, Minneapolis demolished "skid row". Gone were 35 acres (10 ha) with more than 200 buildings, or roughly 40 percent of downtown, including the Gateway District and its significant architecture such as the Metropolitan Building. Opened in 1967, I-35W displaced Black and Mexican neighborhoods in south Minneapolis. In 1968, relocated Native Americans founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis. Begun as an alternative to public and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, AIM's Heart of the Earth Survival School taught Native American traditions to children for nearly twenty years. A same-sex Minneapolis couple appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court but their marriage license was denied. They managed to get a license and marry in 1971, forty years before Minnesota legalized same-sex marriage. Immigration helped to curb the city's mid-20th century population decline. But because of a few radicalized persons, the city's large Somali population was targeted with discrimination after 9/11, when its hawalas or banks were closed.
In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded the murder of George Floyd; Frazier's video contradicted the police department's initial statement. Floyd, a Black man, suffocated when Derek Chauvin, a White Minneapolis police officer, knelt on his neck and back for more than nine minutes. Reporting on the local reaction, The New York Times said that "over three nights, a five-mile stretch of Minneapolis sustained extraordinary damage"—destruction included a police station that demonstrators overran and set on fire. Floyd's murder sparked international rebellions, mass protests, and locally, years of ongoing unrest over racial injustice. As of 2024, protest continued daily at the intersection where Floyd died, now known as George Floyd Square, with the slogan "No justice, no street". Protesters continued to ask for twenty-four reforms—many now met; a sticking point was ending qualified immunity for police. Minneapolis gathered ideas for the square and through community engagement construction was scheduled for 2026, with substantial completion by 2027. Applications were being evaluated for a memorial called Peoples' Way.
Operation Metro Surge, a Department of Homeland Security operation involving the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection began in December 2025, focused on detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. Initially targeting Minneapolis and Saint Paul, 3,000 agents were deployed in the state. Grassroots activists took trainings to observe and record ICE actions. In January 2026, ICE officers killed Renée Good in Minneapolis; later in the month, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti. Both were US citizens. Tens of thousands engaged in mostly peaceful protests. Operation Metro Surge cost Minneapolis about $700 million for December 2025 through April 2026, including police overtime, and extensive disruption to businesses by federal agents—lost business revenue December through March was estimated at $444 million. Border czar Tom Homan announced the surge's end in February but in March more agents were in the state than before the surge. While a preliminary injunction was denied, Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul's ongoing lawsuit argues the surge violated the 10th Amendment.
Historical museums
Exhibits at Mill City Museum feature the city's history of flour milling. The Bakken, formerly known as the Bakken Library and Museum of Electricity in Life, shifted focus in 2016 from electricity and magnetism to invention and innovation, and in 2020 opened a new entrance on Bde Maka Ska. Hennepin History Museum is housed in a former mansion. Built of elaborate woodwork in 1875 and maintained today as a historic site, the little Minnehaha Depot was a stop on one of the first railroads built out of Minneapolis.
The American Swedish Institute occupies a former mansion on Park Avenue. The American Indian Cultural Corridor, about eight blocks on Franklin Avenue, houses All My Relatives Gallery. In 2013, the Somali Museum of Minnesota opened on Lake Street. The Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery was founded in 2018.
Parks and recreation
Landscape architect Horace Cleveland's masterpiece is the Minneapolis park system. In the 1880s, he preserved geographical landmarks and linked them with boulevards and parkways. In their introduction to a modern reprint of Cleveland's treatise on landscape architecture, professors Daniel Nadenicek and Lance Neckar add that "Cleveland was successful in Minneapolis in great measure because he operated with kindred spirits" like William Watts Folwell and Charles M. Loring. In his book The American City: What Works, What Doesn't, Alexander Garvin wrote Minneapolis built "the best-located, best-financed, best-designed, and best-maintained public open space in America".
Cleveland lobbied for a park on the riverfront to include the city's other waterfall. In 1889, George A. Brackett arranged financing, and his associate Henry Brown paid the state to cover the condemnation of surrounding land. Minnehaha Park, containing the 53-foot (16 m) waterfall Minnehaha Falls, is one of Minnesota's first state parks. The falls became what historian Mary Lethert Wingerd calls a "civic emblem" that appears on products and in placenames.
The city's parks are governed and operated by the independent Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board park district. Beyond its network of 185 neighborhood parks, the park board owns the city's street trees. The board owns nearly all land that borders the city's waterfronts—thus the public owns the city's lakeshore property. The park board owns land outside the city limits including its largest park, Theodore Wirth Park—sitting west of downtown Minneapolis and partly in Golden Valley—which incorporates the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary.
As of 2020, approximately 15 percent of land in Minneapolis is parks, in accordance with the national median, and 98 percent of residents live within one-half mile (0.8 km) of a park. The city's Chain of Lakes extends through five lakes in southwest Minneapolis. The chain is connected by bicycle, running, and walking paths and is used for swimming, fishing, picnics, boating, ice skating, and other activities. A parkway for cars, a bikeway for riders, and a walkway for pedestrians run parallel along the 51-mile (82 km) route of the Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway.
Parks are interlinked in many places, and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area connects regional parks and visitor centers. Among walks and hikes running along the Mississippi River, the five-mile (8 km), hiking-only Winchell Trail offers views of and access to the Mississippi Gorge and a rustic hiking experience. The Minneapolis Aquatennial, a civic celebration of the "City of Lakes", is held each July.
Minneapolis's climate provides opportunities for winter activities such as ice fishing, snowshoeing, ice skating, cross-country skiing, and sledding at many parks and lakes. As of 2024, the park board maintained 43 outdoor ice rinks at 20 sites in winter.
From Wikipedia’s article on Minneapolis, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5