Pionerd

Robert Hickman escaped slavery in Missouri in 1863 with nothing but a congregation and a name. Twelve years before he was permitted to lead the church he founded, he was already building something that would outlast a freeway, a city, and 160 years of Minnesota history.

May 14th is Hmong American Day in Minnesota. In 1961, the CIA recruited a General Vang Pao to fight a war America would deny for thirty years. Tens of thousands of Hmong soldiers followed him. They rescued downed pilots, protected classified installations, and held the mountains of Laos while Congress was never told they existed. Approximately, thirty-five thousand of them did not survive. Tens of thousands of Hmong civilians died. On May 14, 1975, it ended in a single helicopter lifting off a runway. What followed were Mekong River crossings, refugee camps, and eventually the first family arriving in Anoka later that...

In the spring of 1942, more than eighty Dakota County farm families had six weeks to leave. What the federal government built in their place was unlike anything Minnesota had ever seen. What happened next was unlike anything the government planned. What the land became is the part nobody really talks about.

Dr. Nellie Barsness died 60 years ago today. She became the first woman born in Minnesota to earn a medical degree from the University of Minnesota in 1902, practicing medicine for over fifty years into her eighties. When the Army and the Red Cross both turned her away from serving as a doctor in World War I because of her gender, she found another way, receiving the highest honor from France. 

Minnesota became a state on May 11th, 1858. What Congress actually ratified that day is a harder question. Two political parties so opposed, they refused to share a room spent six weeks drafting the same document in separate wings of the same building, signed two versions on two colors of paper, and sent both to Washington. Voters approved a constitution most of them never knew was two. A legislature passed laws before the state legally existed. And somewhere between St. Paul and Washington, the wrong constitution ended up attached to the bill. It worked anyway. Today we find out how.<...

On May 10th, 1908, Anna Jarvis held the first official Mother's Day service in Grafton, West Virginia. What transpired didn't go according to her plan. On this same date in 1823, the steamboat Virginia arrived at Fort Snelling, the first steam-powered vessel to navigate the upper Mississippi. Among its passengers was Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, carrying a red umbrella and a plan to find the source of the Mississippi.

The University of Minnesota, May 1972. Eight days that became the most turbulent moment in the school's history — and a story most Minnesotans have never heard. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this one.

Before 1992, exactly two Tibetans lived in Minnesota. Today there are thousands. This is the story of how one man named Thupten Dadak built a community out of nothing, how forty dollars changed everything, and on Mother's Day 2011, one of the most recognized human beings on the planet sat in Mariucci Arena in Minneapolis and told six thousand people the world was waking up. Host, Robert Thomas, was there.

Sixty-six days into Prohibition, the sheriff of Hennepin County was under arrest. The county attorney was next. A bootlegger, a brothel owner, and the highest law enforcement officials in Minnesota's most populous county had been running Canadian whiskey through Minneapolis in railroad cars full of scrap metal — and a federal court was about to hear exactly how it worked. Today's episode traces the Winnipeg Liquor Conspiracy of 1920, the Norwegian-American congressman from Granite Falls who wrote the law they broke, the Stearns County farmers who turned moonshine into a matter of survival and pride, and the city across the river th...

On the evening of May 6th, 1965, six tornadoes, four of them among the most violent on the Fujita scale, tore through the Twin Cities over three hours. Thirteen people were killed. This is the story of the storms. It is also the story of a debate inside a Weather Bureau office, a physical key, and one forecaster's decision to repurpose Cold War infrastructure. This episode is dedicated to Paul Huttner, who retired on May 1 after forty years as chief meteorologist at Minnesota Public Radio News. He was four years old on May 6th, 1965. It is the night that inspired...

On May 5th, 1975, fifty artists and neighbors marched through the Powderhorn neighborhood of South Minneapolis — one of the most culturally diverse communities in the state — with giant puppets, two accordions, and an idea. What they started that day, five days after the end of the Vietnam War, grew into one of Minnesota's most beloved civic traditions. This is the story of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre and fifty years of May Day in Minneapolis.

On May 4th, 1925, the first Model T rolled off the assembly line at Ford's new Twin Cities plant on the bluffs above the Mississippi River in St. Paul. What followed was eighty-six years of automobiles, union wages, wartime production, and four generations of St. Paul families who built their lives inside those walls. But the story of how the plant got there — and what it left behind — is one most Minnesotans have never fully heard. Today we tell it. From Ford's Minneapolis origins, to the river that powered everything, to the generators still turning after a hundred years, to the...

On May 3rd, 1959, a British cargo ship named the Ramon de Larrinaga sailed under Duluth's Aerial Lift Bridge and became the first oceangoing vessel in history to reach the western end of Lake Superior. She had crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool. She had navigated sixteen sets of locks through the newly opened St. Lawrence Seaway. And she had arrived in a city that sixty years earlier had been described as a lifeless corpse. Today's episode is the story of how Minnesota's Iron Range helped build a waterway, how entire communities were flooded to make it possible, and how a...

On May 2nd, 1878, a flour dust explosion destroyed the Washburn A Mill in Minneapolis, the largest flour mill in the world, killing eighteen men and devastating the city's milling capacity. What followed transformed not just Minneapolis but the entire country, from the safety innovations that changed flour milling worldwide, to the birth of the Minneapolis Fire Department, to the brands that are still in your kitchen today. General Mills, Gold Medal Flour, Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, WCCO Radio, and the Washburn Center for Children, all trace their origins to one catastrophic Thursday evening on the banks of the Mississippi River.<...

It's May 1st, 1951. A nineteen-year-old from Alabama wakes up in Minneapolis to snow on the ground and has no idea what happens next. His name is Willie Mays.

Welcome to Pionerd — your daily Minnesota history podcast. One story, every day. Follow now so you don't miss day one.