City: Mendota, MN

Category: Tours & Attractions

Telephone: (651) 452-1596

Address: 1357 Sibley Memorial Hwy.

Description: Henry Hastings Sibley, an American Fur Company regional manager and Minnesota’s first governor, lived in a limestone home amid a trading post in the riverside hamlet of Mendota. Today visitors can walk through three of the structures in one of Minnesota’s oldest European-American settlements, including the home of Sibley and his neighbor, Jean Baptiste Faribault. Sibley’s restored house is full of fur trade stuff and the trappings of frontier gentility—pelts, muskets, and loads of blue china. The guides’ stories of Sibley and company are vivid snapshots of the difficulties faced by these tough frontiersmen living in a wild world.Plan ahead: The house is only open six days a year (the first and third Saturdays of June, July, and August).