Casselton, North Dakota

Casselton sits at the birthplace of bonanza farming in North America. In eighteen seventy-four, George Cass, president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and his colleague Benjamin Cheney acquired roughly ten thousand acres of railroad land near here and hired a Yale-trained lawyer named Oliver Dalrymple to manage it. Dalrymple planted twelve hundred and eighty acres of wheat in eighteen seventy-six and broke another thirty-two hundred acres in the same season.

The harvest proved that the Red River Valley's black prairie soil could produce wheat at industrial scale, and that demonstration set off the great Dakota land rush of the late eighteen seventies and eighties. The town that grew up around the Northern Pacific station was named Casselton for George Cass, shortened slightly from the original Casstown. By eighteen eighty-five the population reached nearly fourteen hundred.

The bonanza farms are gone, but Casselton remains the commercial heart of eastern Cass County, and its name still carries the fingerprints of the railroad monopoly that built it.