Minnesota has a habit of being first, not because it plans to be, but because the right people show up at the right moment and do not wait for permission. Today, one date in three different years and more firsts than you can count. A baseball player and a community that answered a question the rest of the country was still arguing about. A coffee shop on the West Bank where something started one month before Stonewall. A courthouse, a student body election, a party platform, a marriage, and a legal fight that lasted 45 years. All of it happened here first.

Before St. Paul had a name, the Dakota called this stretch of the Mississippi the big middle. Then a one-eyed bootlegger showed up and nearly named a capital city after himself. On May 16, 1850, the first Protestant church in Minnesota burned to the ground. On May 16, 1938, the island still carrying that bootlegger's name became home to the first wastewater treatment facility on the entire Mississippi River. One place that has been at the center of something in every era it has passed through.

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 December, all of it becoming one of the most remarkable community stories in Minnesota history.

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.