Minnesota State Horticultural Society
horticultural society
The Minnesota State Horticultural Society (MSHS), with headquarters in Roseville, Minnesota, is a nonprofit membership organization that provides education and resources to northern gardeners in the United States. It publishes Northern Gardener, a bi-monthly magazine that is the only U.S. publication devoted exclusively to gardening in Hardiness Zones 3-5. Its "Garden-in-a-Box" program provides raised bed garden boxes, along with soil and vegetable plants, to low-income families and schoolchildren in the greater Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota area and elsewhere in Minnesota. "Minnesota Green" is a MSHS program that coordinates donations of plant material from growers, garden centers, and individuals to public space and community gardens. MSHS offers classes year-round on gardening subjects. MSHS currently has 10,000 members and subscribers to its publication.
History
MSHS was founded in 1866 as the Minnesota Fruit Growers Association during a meeting of orchard owners at the Minnesota State Fair held in Rochester, Minnesota. The original purpose of this group was to share information on how to successfully grow apples and other fruit in Minnesota. Daniel A. Robertson helped found the society and was elected as their first President.
“Minnesota State Horticultural Society” enters the record as horticultural society. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Minnesota, State and Horticultural can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Minnesota State Horticultural Society” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Minnesota, State and Horticultural provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28225933. VIAF identifies the subject as 143337587. The Library of Congress control number is no00022165. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1866.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. 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.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Minnesota State Horticultural Society”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Minnesota State Horticultural Society primary sources, Minnesota State Horticultural Society archive and Minnesota research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Minnesota State Horticultural Society”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Minnesota State Horticultural Society” 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.