Grandin: The Bonanza Brothers
North Dakota
The town of Grandin was named for three brothers from Pennsylvania who built the largest bonanza farm in North Dakota history.
John, William, and Elijah Grandin had made their fortune in the Pennsylvania oil fields beginning in eighteen fifty-nine. When the financier Jay Cooke went bankrupt in the panic of eighteen seventy-three, he owed the brothers ninety-three thousand dollars and paid them with discounted Northern Pacific Railroad land grants in the Dakota Territory. The brothers turned those grants into a wheat operation that grew to roughly eighty-six thousand acres at its peak by some accounts, run like a factory, with hired crews managing fifteen-hundred-acre subdivisions.
When the Northern Pacific platted a town on their land in eighteen eighty-one, it took the family name. By nineteen hundred the bonanza era was fading and the vast holdings were broken up and sold to smaller settlers.
