Manchester, South Dakota

Manchester, South Dakota, once had two churches, a hotel, a newspaper, two grain elevators, a lumber yard, a town hall, a high school, and two hundred forty-eight residents. It was a functioning agricultural community in Kingsbury County, platted in eighteen eighty-one and named for its first postmaster, Chester H. Manchester.

The automobile and better roads gradually pulled commerce away toward the larger town of Huron. By two thousand, only forty people remained. On June twenty-fourth, two thousand three, a powerful tornado rated F-four struck the town and demolished nearly everything still standing. In two thousand four, South Dakota officially removed Manchester from its records. There is almost nothing left to see from the highway, just a cleared field where a town used to be. Manchester is one of hundreds of Great Plains communities that followed the arc from railroad promise to grassland silence.