This week in state history

Historic Minnesota events with anniversaries this week.

March 27

1905 The Aerial Bridge, spanning the Duluth shipping canal, carries its first passengers across the harbor inside a carriage suspended from the bridge framework. The system would be replaced with a lift bridge in 1930.

March 28

1992 William Maupins, Duluth’s prominent civil rights leader, dies. He served as president of the Duluth NAACP chapter, and, when a black family was prevented from moving into a Duluth neighborhood, he launched the campaign that led to a city fair-housing ordinance. He also organized a food drive for poor blacks in Mississippi. When white truckers in the South tried to block the shipments, he persuaded Duluth teamsters to deliver the food.

March 29

1855 In St. Anthony, Minnesota’s Republicans hold their first formal meeting, during which they discuss the group’s strong antislavery stance.

1928 St. Paul’s new 2,000-watt radio station KSTP begins broadcasting. It would increase its power to a potential 50,000 watts by 1935 and claim to be the only high-fidelity, high-power radio transmitter in the West and the first U.S. station to reach Australia.

1980 Walter H. Deubener, co-inventor of the handled grocery bag, dies in St. Paul. He was the owner of the S. S. Kresge store, St. Paul’s first cash-and-carry (rather than delivery) grocery store. In 1918, Deubener and his wife, Lydia, devised a bag with a string around the bottom that would enable shoppers to carry additional groceries to their destination. He received a patent and soon was manufacturing bags in his home state of Indiana, becoming a millionaire.

1998 Ferocious tornado touchdowns strike a dozen communities eastward from Nobles to Wabasha counties in south-central Minnesota, causing at least one death and numerous injuries, damaging Comfrey and St. Peter, and carrying debris many miles away. Extensive damage in Comfrey forces residents to evacuate from their homes, while the devastation in St. Peter prompts an eyewitness to remark that the city looks “decapitated.”

April 2

2002 Nellie Stone Johnson dies in Minneapolis at the age of 96. Johnson was an African American civil rights activist and union leader who was influential in Minnesota politics from the 1930s through the 20th century. She was raised in rural Hinckley.

This column is derived from MNopedia.org and developed by the Minnesota Historical Society and its partners.