It started with a painting. Playwright Calvin Alexander Ramsey was in New Haven in 2010 to stage one of his plays, “The Green Book,” at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.

Ramsey is a member of the National Arts Club, New York, Sons of The American Revolution, and a former Trustee at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York.

The Alexander Ramsey House is one of 26 historic sites MNHS manages across the state. Ramsey, who was governor of Minnesota during the 1862 U.S.-Dakota war, called for the Dakota to “be ...