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Aberdeen, South Dakota Vacations and Abredeen Travel Packages and Tours

Aberdeen City Photo 

Aberdeen is a city and the county seat of Brown County, South Dakota, USA, about 125 mi (200 km) N.E. of Pierre. Settled in 1880, it was incorporated in 1882. The population was 24,658 at the 2000 census.

Aberdeen Settlement History

Before Aberdeen or Brown County was inhabited by European settlers, it was inhabited by the Sioux Indians from approximately 1700 to 1879. The first appearance of Caucasians was with the founding of fur trading posts during the 1820s; these trading posts remained operational until the mid 1830s. The first “settlers” of this region were the Arikara Indians, but they would later be joined by others.

The first group of Caucasian settlers to reach the area that is now Brown County was a party of only four people, three horses, two mules, fifteen cattle, and two wagons. This group of settlers were later joined by another group the following spring, and eventually more and more settlers continued to migrate towards this general area which is currently Columbia, South Dakota. This town was established June 15, 1879.

The majority of the settlers were Caucasian, the with the next largest group being Native American, a trend that has continued to this day.

Creation of Aberdeen

Aberdeen, like many towns of the Midwest, was built around the newly developing railroad systems. Aberdeen was first officially plotted as a town site on January 3, 1881 by Charles Prior, the superintendent of the Minneapolis office of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, or the Milwaukee Road for short, which was presided over by Alexander Mitchell. Mitchell, Charles Prior’s boss, was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, from which the town of Aberdeen, South Dakota received its name. Aberdeen was officially founded on July 6, 1881, the date of the first arrival of a Milwaukee Railroad train. Aberdeen then operated under a city charter granted by the Territorial Legislature in March, 1883.

As Aberdeen grew, many businesses and buildings were constructed along Aberdeen’s Main Street. However, this would soon be a problem due to Aberdeen’s “unique” geography; Aberdeen is, after all, referred to as “The Town in the Frog Pond”. At first, this unique condition presented no problem to the newly constructed buildings because it had not rained very much; but eventually, citizens would see how inconvenient this problem would become. During dry periods, this Frog Pond caused no trouble and was unnoticeable; but when heavy rains fell, the Pond would reappear and flood the basements of every building on Main Street, causing many business owners and home owners much turmoil.

When this flooding would happen, the city had only one little steam pump that was to be used to dry out the entire area that was flooded, which would take days, if not weeks – and more often than not, it would have rained again in this time period and cause even more flooding, even in the basements that had already been emptied of the water. And then, even once the water was gone from the basements, the city still had to deal with the mud that was also a result of the heavy rains. It was because of this Frog Pond that the city decided in 1882 to build an artesian ditch, which would later be upgraded and developed into an artesian well in 1884 to combat the heavy rains and keep the basements from flooding. Even though the artesian well was designed by the city engineers to prevent flooding and develop a water system, this was not how things happened; during the digging of the well, the water stream that was found underground was too powerful to contain due to all of the built up pressure, which caused the water to come blasting out with violent force and soon had the entirety of Main Street under, in some cases, four feet of water. The engineers realized the previous flaws of the artesian well plan and soon added a gate valve to the well to control the flow of water, giving Aberdeen its first working water supply.

By 1886, Aberdeen had three different railroad companies with depots built in the newly developing town; due to these three railroads intersecting here, Aberdeen soon became known as the “Hub City of the Dakotas”. When looking down on Aberdeen from above with a bird’s eye view, the railroad tracks converging in Aberdeen resembled the spokes of a wheel converging at a hub, hence the name “Hub City of the Dakotas”. These three different railroad companies are the reason why Aberdeen was able to grow and flourish as it did; however, only one of these railroads is still presently running through Aberdeen, the railroad today known as the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

According to the census of 1900, Aberdeen had a population of 4,087; by the census of 1910, it had reached a population of 10,752, an increase of 163 percent. It was from these censuses that Aberdeen was predicted to reach a population of 50,000 by 1920. However, this was not the case; the population soon began to decline. The estimated population as of July 2006 is 24,071, a 2.4% decrease since 2000. Community groups blame this decline on the flight of young adults and an increasingly aging population.

Aberdeen is the county seat of Brown County. The original county seat of Brown County, however, was Columbia. During the days of the railroad construction, plans were laid to bring the railroad through Columbia, then the county seat. When word of this spread, land in and around Columbia soared in price due to speculation. When time came for the railroads to purchase land, the increase in land prices in and around Columbia led them to change their decision and instead route the rail lines through Aberdeen. However, once Aberdeen became a town in 1881, there was a long-running controversy concerning which town would be the county seat, which continued until 1890, when it was declared by the newly formed South Dakota state constitution in 1889 that a majority vote could move the county seat if the county seat in question had originally been established by less than a majority vote. The result of the vote declared that Aberdeen would be the county seat once and for all, so all of the records were once again transferred to Aberdeen’s courthouse; during the battle for county seat, the records had been moved from Columbia’s courthouse to Aberdeen’s courthouse (which was built from 1886 to 1887), and back again to Columbia’s in what seemed to be a never-ending cycle of the transferring of records. This was typically done in the form of nighttime raids from the two towns.

May 2007 Flood in Aberdeen

During a 48-hour period beginning on the morning of Friday, May 4th and ending on the morning of Sunday, May 6th Aberdeen received 9.12 inches (232 mm) of precipitation. This rain flooded city streets, making many of them impassible for a short time, and caused water damage to many homes. Within 2 weeks of the storm, over 300 families had requested assistance from disaster response agencies. As of May 25, 104 houses had been condemned due to the damage; of these, 47 were declared unlivable. Brown County, which includes Aberdeen, was declared a disaster area.

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