Birthplace of Minnesota: The Stillwater Convention of 1848
Near Stillwater, Minnesota
You are standing where Minnesota began, near the corner of Main and Myrtle Streets in downtown Stillwater. On the morning of August twenty sixth, eighteen forty eight, delegates from across the Saint Croix valley climbed to the upper floor of John McKusick's store and set in motion the birth of a state. Their problem was a peculiar one.
Earlier that year, on May twenty ninth, Wisconsin had entered the Union, but its western border stopped at the Saint Croix River. That left the wedge of land between the Saint Croix and the Mississippi with no organized government at all. No courts, no officials, no territory to belong to.
The settlers here decided to solve it themselves. The gathering has come down to us as the Stillwater Convention, and by tradition sixty one delegates took part, among them prominent figures of the frontier like Joseph Renshaw Brown and Henry Hastings Sibley. They did two lasting things.
First, they settled on a name, agreeing to call the future territory Minnesota, a word drawn from the Dakota language describing the sky tinted waters of the Minnesota River. Second, they drafted a memorial, a formal petition to Congress, urging the swift creation of a Minnesota Territory and pointing to the region's pine forests, farmland, and growing population. They chose Sibley to carry their case to Washington as their emissary, and that autumn a separate election sent him east as the region's delegate.
Their lobbying worked. On March third, eighteen forty nine, Congress organized the Territory of Minnesota. Washington County was created with Stillwater as its county seat, and nine years later, on May eleventh, eighteen fifty eight, Minnesota became the thirty second state.
That is why this little river town, and not the growing settlement upstream that would become Saint Paul, carries the proud nickname Birthplace of Minnesota. Today a commemorative marker here at Main and Myrtle fixes the memory in stone. Stand quietly a moment and imagine the argument, the ambition, and the sheer nerve of a frontier village deciding to invent a state.
