Colfax, North Dakota, The Vice President's Land

Colfax, in Richland County, carries the name of Schuyler Colfax, who served as Vice President of the United States under Ulysses S. Grant from eighteen sixty-nine to eighteen seventy-three. Colfax had personally purchased over three thousand acres in the territory before the town was platted, making him a significant absentee landowner in the region.

The original townsite plat was filed on March nineteenth, eighteen eighty-one, and a first addition was added that June. The name was officially designated Colfax in eighteen eighty-two. The Northern Pacific Railroad had been granted the land corridor through Congress back in eighteen sixty-four to push tracks to the Pacific, and that land grant made settlement possible. Colfax today is a tiny Richland County village, but it bears the name of a Gilded Age Vice President who owned a piece of the Dakota prairie.