Aberdeen, South Dakota: Hub City of the Northern Plains
Near Aberdeen, South Dakota
Aberdeen sits in the broad flat valley of the James River, on a landscape so level and so open that on a clear day you can watch weather systems approach from fifty miles away.
It was founded in eighteen eighty-one, named for a city in Scotland by a Milwaukee Road official who had never seen the Dakota prairie and probably could not have imagined it. Aberdeen grew faster than almost any settlement in the territory during the railroad boom of the early eighteen eighties, and it crashed when the drought arrived in eighteen eighty-eight, and then it rebuilt, and that cycle of boom and correction and slow recovery is essentially the story of the Northern Plains.
About twenty-eight thousand people live in Aberdeen today, making it the third-largest city in South Dakota. It is the commercial, medical, and educational hub for a broad agricultural region. A state university, a regional hospital system, and the convergence of rail and highway freight routes give Aberdeen a stability that many smaller prairie cities have lost.
The city carries an unlikely literary legacy. L. Frank Baum lived here for three years during the drought, failed twice, and left for Chicago. He took with him a bone-deep memory of treeless flatness, sudden violent storms, and communities trying to survive on hope and insufficient rain. A decade later, those memories found their way into a book about a girl from Kansas and a tornado and a land that turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than the gray world she had left behind.
