Minnesota State Highway 4
highway in Minnesota
Minnesota State Highway 4 (MN 4) is a 167.136-mile-long (268.979 km) highway in southwest and west-central Minnesota, which runs from Iowa Highway 4 at the Iowa state line (near Dunnell, MN and Estherville, IA), and continues north to its northern terminus at its interchange with Interstate Highway 94 near Sauk Centre and Melrose.
Route description
State Highway 4 serves as a north–south route between Sherburn, Saint James, Sleepy Eye, Fairfax, Hector, Paynesville, and Meire Grove in southwest and west-central Minnesota.
Highway 4 parallels U.S. Highway 71 and State Highway 15 throughout its route.
Fort Ridgely State Park is located on Highway 4 in Nicollet County on the Minnesota River. The park is located south of Fairfax and northwest of New Ulm.
History
The segment of Highway 4 between Paynesville and Interstate 94 is part of Minnesota Constitutional Route 4, established in 1920; the remainder of Highway 4 was authorized in 1933. Between Saint James and the Iowa border, Highway 4 followed very closely the former Minneapolis & St Louis Railway the remains of which are clearly visible on the west side of the highway between Minnesota Highway 60 and Sherburn, Minnesota. Grain elevators in Echols, Ormsby, Trimont, and Sherburn are aligned with the former M&StL route through each of these towns.
The route was completely paved by 1961.
“Minnesota State Highway 4” enters the record as highway in Minnesota. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Minnesota, State and Highway can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Minnesota State Highway 4” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Minnesota, State and Highway provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2484479. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1933 and 1961.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Minnesota State Highway 4” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.