Ellendale, Minnesota

Ellendale is a Steele County town that owed its birth entirely to a railroad and the man who named its stops. When the Burlington, Cedar Rapids and Northern Railway pushed its line through the thirty-two miles between Albert Lea and Owatonna around nineteen hundred, a right-of-way agent named Thomas H. Brown was responsible for picking station locations.

Brown named this one Ellendale in honor of Ellen Dale Ives, wife of the railroad president, in recognition of her humanitarian work among railway employees. The village was platted in nineteen hundred, incorporated in nineteen oh-one, and by the end of that first year counted two hundred residents. By nineteen ten it had roughly two hundred sixty residents.

Today it sits just off Interstate Thirty-Five with a population of roughly seven hundred.