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.