May 11 · This Day in America
President James Buchanan signs the bill, and a territory of pine, prairie, and ten thousand lakes becomes a state. Eight years earlier only six thousand settlers lived here; now there are a hundred and fifty thousand, and the question dividing the Capitol is not really Minnesota — it is slavery, and which way each new star on the flag will tip the balance. The free North wins this one. And here is the part that feels like the frontier itself: the news cannot keep up with the country it describes. No telegraph reaches St. Paul, no railroad. So word of statehood travels the last leg the old way — by steamboat, churning up the Mississippi — and Minnesota is a state for almost two weeks before Minnesota finds out.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1751
Dr. Thomas Bond has an idea no colony has tried: a hospital for the sick poor and the mentally ill wandering Philadelphia's streets. He cannot raise the money alone, so he asks his friend Benjamin Franklin. Franklin invents the matching grant on the spot — the legislature will pay if the public does — and Pennsylvania Hospital is born. It is still treating patients today, the oldest hospital in the nation.
Source: www.uphs.upenn.edu