Buxton, North Dakota, J. J. Hill's Railroad Deal

Buxton, in Traill County, was a planned town from the start. In eighteen eighty, a man named Budd Reeve platted the townsite after his partners in the Buxton townsite company negotiated a real estate deal with James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad. The town was named for Thomas J. Buxton, a Minneapolis city official and close friend of Reeve. The Great Northern laid tracks through and the post office opened in November eighteen eighty.

The surrounding area had already drawn Scandinavian homesteaders, families with names like Jacobson, Ingvalson, and Fevold who had settled the prairie by eighteen seventy-eight. The railroad gave them a market town. Buxton organized formally in eighteen eighty-one and served as a local grain and supply center for the broad Traill County plains. It remains a small agricultural community today, population about three hundred fifty.