The people of Aberdeen have built a monument to Andrew
Melgaard, who gave the city a beautiful park. They dedicated another to Father
Robert Haire, appropriately commemorating him as a "Friend of
Humanity." They plan to memorialize L. Frank Baum, whose Dorothy of
Emerald City fame was probably conceived here. There is even a monument to the
municipal mules, Maude and
Kate, recognizing their thirty-one years of valiant
service to the city. There is no monument to Charles H. Prior, who had a more
profound influence on the community, though he never lived here.
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| Charles H. Prior |
In late nineteenth century America, railroad companies
founded most new communities as each rushed to lay track faster than its
competitors. They expected to profit both from the freight and passenger traffic
these towns would generate, and from the sale and lease of prime city lots. A
new end-of-the-line community was certain to be a boom town, at least until the
tracks moved onward. When there were no automobiles, trucks, airplanes,
interstate highways, or even paved roads, railways had the economic impact that
all combined have today.
In 1880, the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad was
building its Hastings and Dakota Division westward through this east-central
section of what was then essentially unpopulated Dakota Territory. At the same
time, they were building their James River Division to run north and south
through the same area. The pace was frantic.
The Milwaukee's original plan for its Hastings & Dakota
Division would have taken it from Ortonville on the Minnesota border, west to
Bristol or Andover, then northwest to Columbia and Bismarck. Columbia, founded
in 1879, was the first town in Brown County. Superbly sited on the James and
Elm Rivers, it was developing rapidly. In 1880 it became the county seat and
had a post office and a mail route to Jamestown. Columbians were busy building
hotels. A new dam on the James River
would provide a lake for recreation and transportation and power for a flour
mill. Steamboats would soon begin paddling to Ludden and points north on a
regular schedule.
Columbians had hopes that their city would become the
territorial capitol. All they lacked was a railroad, and they were certain they
would get it. But when Prior, the superintendent of the Minneapolis office of
the Milwaukee, contacted the city leaders about right-of-way and property
considerations, they made demands that he felt were unacceptably expensive. He
changed the route, and grade construction then proceeded west from Bristol
until, after angling slightly north, it stopped in August in the middle of a
dry slough (Aberdeen). It was here that Prior planned to build a city.
It is unlikely Prior knew his new town site was subject to
annual flooding. In the fall of 1880, he was preoccupied with labor problems,
but even from his office in Minneapolis, he could see the advantages of the
site just by looking at a map. It looked good for freight and passenger
business. The new Milwaukee tracks would bisect the planned Chicago and North
Western line
At a point almost equidistant from the grandly platted new
towns of Rudolph and Ordway. It looked good for community development: the
North Western's managers had been expecting to benefit from a new city where
grade stakes indicated their line would intersect the Milwaukee's James River
Division. Prior's revised plan would spoil their hopes. Acting as town site
agent for the railway, Prior and his wife Delia bought a half-section of land
for $380 on November 10, 1880. He platted the city of Aberdeen on a portion of
this property, and the Watertown Land Office registered the plat on January 3,
1881.
As superintendent of all Milwaukee operations west of the Mississippi,
Prior was an enormously powerful man. In military terms, he was equivalent to a
general. As town site agent, he extended that power and increased his wealth.
The railroads had learned that once their construction plans were known,
speculators purchased all the best town site property. To keep the Milwaukee's
plans secret, Prior purchased land for town sites in his own name. He resold it
in his own name and presumably passed a portion of the proceeds to top
executives, who did not want profits to flow to stockholders unnecessarily. It
is likely that Prior supervised the selection, purchase, and platting of all
the Milwaukee town sites in Minnesota and Dakota west of the Mississippi and
east of the Missouri. He named most of them, including Prior Lake, Minnesota.
He named Aberdeen to honor his boss, Alexander Mitchell, for his birthplace in
Scotland. Prior, who was born in Connecticut, was responsible for importing all
those Massachusetts and Connecticut village names: Webster, Bristol, Andover,
Ipswich, Groton, Westport, and others.
Prior planned the location of the new
city's depot along the end of the grade and centered its main street just to
the west of the depot. Then he subdivided sixteen blocks of the property, and
in June contracted with Mr. Samuel Jumper to begin selling lots. The tracks and
first construction train would not arrive until July 6, but before then,
impatient speculators walked or rode from as far as Watertown, eager to be
among the first buyers.
Unfortunately, after a winter of deep snows and a late
spring thaw, many lots on Main Street (Prior had named it First Street) were
under water. George B. Daly, Columbia's first school teacher and later an
Aberdeen newspaper publisher, recalled that rival towns "were in great
glee over the town in the frog pond. Related to today's landmarks, the
"frog pond" consisted of a large body of water west of the Milwaukee
depot with several tributaries, including one that cut across Main Street near
Second Avenue and extended to the comer of Third Avenue and Lincoln Street.
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| Railroad Map at Statehood |
Excerpts from “The Town in a Frog Pond”, by Don Artz
