The first European likely to have visited the Nobles County area of southwestern Minnesota was French explorer Joseph Nicollet.

Miller, editor of the Toledo Blade, organized a company to locate a colony of New England settlers who had already settled in Northern Ohio along the tracks of the Sioux City and St. Paul Railway.

These people were "Yankee" settlers whose parents had moved from New England to the region of Northeast Ohio known as the Connecticut Western Reserve.

They were primarily members of the Congregational Church, though due to the Second Great Awakening, many of them had converted to Methodism and Presbyterianism, and some had become Baptists before coming to what is now Minnesota.

A town was plotted, and the name was changed from the Okabena Railway Station to Worthington, Miller's mother-in-law's maiden name.

One early arrival described the scene: We were among the first members of the colony to arrive at the station of an unfinished railroad… There was a good hotel, well and comfortably furnished, one or two stores neatly furnished and already stocked with goods, [and] several other[s] in process of erection… The streets, scarcely to be defined as such, were full of prairie schooners, containing families waiting until masters could suit themselves with "claims," the women pursuing their housewifely avocations meanwhile—some having cooking stoves in their wagons, others using gypsy fires to do their culinary work; all seeming happy and hopeful.

[12] Some settlers from New England were drinking men, most of them Civil War veterans from Massachusetts and Maine, and they came into conflict with the temperance movement.

A witness described what happened next: Upon seeing this, the young men of the town thought it to be rather an imposition, and collected together, procured the services of the band, and under the direction of a military officer marched to the rear of the hotel, and with a wheelbarrow and shovel took the empty keg that had been broken open, and playing the dead march with flag at half staff marched to the flagpole in front of Humiston's office where they dug a grave and gave the empty keg a burial with all the honors attending a soldier's funeral.

Thus ended the glorious Fourth at Worthington, Minn.[14] Despite tensions between pro- and anti-temperance factions, the town grew rapidly.

Some had come from Upstate New York and had parents and grandparents who had moved to that region from New England during the early 1800s and late 1700s.

In such an atmosphere, settlers without connection to the National Colony also arrived in great number, and few of those were temperance activists.

The ensuing winter was severe, and swarms of grasshoppers stripped farmers' fields bare in the summer of 1873.

In the early 1900s German immigrants began arriving in Worthington in large numbers, not directly from Germany, but mostly from other places in the midwest, especially Ohio, where their communities had already been established.

[15] Unlike in other parts of the country, the Germans did not face xenophobia in Nobles County, but were welcomed by the Yankee population.

Before World War I, many German community leaders in Minnesota and Wisconsin spoke openly and enthusiastically about how much better America was than Germany, due primarily (in their eyes) to the presence of English law and the English political culture the Americans had inherited from the colonial era, which they contrasted with the turmoil and oppression in Germany they had so recently fled.

[citation needed] On December 12, 2006, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staged a coordinated predawn raid at the Swift & Company meat packing plant in Worthington and five other Swift plants in western states, interviewing workers and hauling hundreds off in buses.

[23] Some sources credit this immigration trend for revitalizing the city's economy, which had been constrained by a shrinking population.

Worthington is in Minnesota's 1st congressional district, represented by Republican Brad Finstad of New Ulm.

[34] ISD 518 is known regionally[35] for its robust music program offerings, with band, string orchestra, choir, and theater ensembles open to all students.

Minnesota West's Worthington campus is a two-year college that offers associate degrees in a wide variety of majors, along with diplomas and certificates in areas from practical nursing to accounting, among others.

The Globe serves Worthington, Nobles County, and surrounding areas with a print newspaper, an e-paper and website.

It was purchased by the Forum Communications Company in 1995 and publishes a print edition on Wednesdays and an e-edition on Saturdays.

[44] The relationship began in 1947, when Martha (Cashel) McCarthy and her parents led a campaign to collect clothing and food for Crailsheim's citizens (who had endured the destruction of 90% of their city ten days prior to the end of World War II).