Hub City: Aberdeen's Railroad Founding

Aberdeen did not grow up around a river crossing, a military fort, or a mission. It grew up around a railroad argument.

In the summer of eighteen eighty-one, two competing rail lines reached the same stretch of northern Dakota Territory at almost the same moment. The Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railway, which locals called the Milwaukee Road, drove its tracks into the Jim River valley first. The Chicago and North Western Railway arrived hard behind it. When a third line, the Minneapolis and Saint Louis, threatened to join the rush, it became clear this particular junction would be something special.

The Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul won the naming rights. A company official christened the townsite Aberdeen after his hometown in Scotland. Lots went on sale in January of eighteen eighty-two, and the population jumped from nothing to nearly a thousand residents inside six months. By eighteen eighty-three, Aberdeen was the fastest-growing town in the entire Dakota Territory.

The logic of the place was pure geography. The Jim River valley offered gentle grades in every direction, making Aberdeen a natural transfer hub where freight and passengers moving east-west could switch to lines running north-south. This earned it the nickname it still carries today: the Hub City.

Three rail lines converging on a single prairie townsite created an instant economy. Grain elevators rose along the tracks. Implement dealers set up shop to sell machinery to the homesteaders flooding into Brown County. Hotels, banks, and newspapers followed within the year.

Aberdeen was founded as a town in eighteen eighty-one and chartered as a city by eighteen eighty-three, before most of its streets had names. The Dakota boom of the early eighteen eighties was a speculative fever, and Aberdeen caught it harder than almost anywhere. The question was whether the soil, the climate, and the railroad companies would deliver what the promoters promised.