Home Appointments Sheriff
Sheriff
Mower County Sheriff's Office, Minnesota
| Appointee | Terese Amazi |
|---|---|
| Role | Sheriff |
| Organisation | Mower County Sheriff's Office, Minnesota |
| Domain | Law Enforcement |
| Start | 6 January 2003 |
| End | 31 December 2018 |
| Notes | First woman elected sheriff in Minnesota history; earlier MN women were appointed widow-successors (1922 |
Terese Amazi was elected sheriff of Mower County, Minnesota in November 2002 and took office in January 2003, becoming the first woman elected sheriff in the history of Minnesota. She served four elected terms before retiring in December 2018 — sixteen years in office, the longest tenure of any of the dataset's state-first women sheriffs at the time of her departure.
The Minnesota record before Amazi
Two earlier Minnesota women had held the title of county sheriff — both through widow succession, neither through a competitive election:
- Sadie Munroe — Lyon County, appointed April 1922 to complete her late husband's term.
- Anna Sheerin Lowe — Murray County, appointed 1923 to complete her late husband's term.
After Lowe, no woman held the Minnesota sheriff's office for nearly eighty years until Amazi's 2002 election. This is among the dataset's longest documented intervals between same-state first-woman events at a single institutional level.
Background
Amazi joined the Mower County Sheriff's Office in 1981 and served as a deputy and command-level officer for twenty-one years before her 2002 election. Mower County is in south-eastern Minnesota; its principal city is Austin, Minnesota (population approximately 25,000). Amazi's 2002 race was a competitive open-seat election against male opponents.
Subsequent Minnesota first-woman events
The dataset's next Minnesota first-woman sheriff event is Dawanna Witt's 2022 election in Hennepin County (Minneapolis — the state's largest county), which made Witt both Hennepin's first female sheriff and Minnesota's first African-American woman elected to the office. Hennepin first / state Black first / state female-twenty-years-after-Amazi-first — the cluster of distinctions at Witt's event is recorded as context inside the Mower County entry rather than as a separate dossier.
