Gettysburg, South Dakota: A Veterans Colony Finds Its Name

The small South Dakota city of Gettysburg carries the name of one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles for a very deliberate reason: it was founded by the men who fought there. In the early eighteen eighties, a group of Union veterans traveled to Potter County in Dakota Territory to establish what they called a veterans colony, a community of soldiers who had survived the war and wanted land together. According to local tradition, they first hoped to name their new town Meade, in honor of the general who commanded the Union forces at Gettysburg, but the post office rejected that name as too common and Gettysburg was chosen instead.

The county they settled was organized in eighteen eighty-three and named for a territorial official, but the town's identity was always built on that Civil War bond. About eighteen years after Appomattox, old soldiers were still arriving here to claim Dakota homesteads, settling the prairie in the same close formations they had kept under fire. Gettysburg was platted in eighteen eighty-four and not incorporated until nineteen oh seven, and it is the county seat of Potter County.

The town sits along the forty-fifth parallel. Gettysburg Air Force Station was once located here until it closed in nineteen sixty-eight, and about eleven hundred people live in the city today.