Hettinger: Born with the Milwaukee Road

Hettinger did not exist until the Milwaukee Road's transcontinental rail line pushed through southwestern North Dakota in nineteen oh seven. The county it anchors, Adams County, was carved out of the southern portion of Hettinger County that same year by gubernatorial proclamation and named after John Quincy Adams, though not the sixth president. This Adams was the general land and townsite agent for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and Saint Paul Railroads, the man whose job it was to lay out towns exactly like this one.

Hettinger began as tents and tarpaper shanties beside the tracks. Within a year it had a school, elected officials, and a wedding performed by a judge. It became the county seat and has remained so. The town today is home to roughly a thousand people in a county of about two thousand two hundred, the kind of quiet seat that holds the records and the courthouse for a landscape otherwise defined by grass and wind.