Minnesela: The Town the Railroad Killed

Minnesela, whose name comes from the Lakota words for red water, was the first serious settlement in what became Butte County, platted in eighteen eighty-one and named county seat almost immediately. In eighteen seventy-six, pioneers John Spaulding and Thomas Davis had built the first two-story log cabin in the area here, and the community that grew around it expected to become the regional hub of the northern Black Hills. Then the railroad made a different decision.

When the tracks came through in eighteen ninety, surveyors chose a route through Belle Fourche, about three miles to the northwest, rather than through Minnesela. That single routing decision drained the life out of the older town within two decades. Without rail access to ship grain and cattle, businesses followed the tracks.

By nineteen oh one Minnesela had been disestablished, its functions absorbed by Belle Fourche, which became everything Minnesela had hoped to be. The old flour mill stood until nineteen fifty-seven. A historical marker placed by the Butte County Historical Society now marks where the post office and general store once stood.