Rails Across the Plains: Milwaukee Road and Great Northern

Two railroad dynasties shaped Aberdeen's identity, and their fates could not have been more different.

The Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railway, better known as the Milwaukee Road, was Aberdeen's original patron. It platted the town, chose the name, and for decades remained the dominant employer in Brown County. The Milwaukee Road's passenger terminal became a civic landmark, and the company's maintenance shops kept hundreds of men working through the lean years of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.

The Great Northern Railway, built by James J. Hill out of Saint Paul, arrived in Aberdeen later as part of Hill's relentless push toward the Pacific Northwest. Hill believed in what he called scientific farming, and he stationed agents across the Northern Plains to teach settlers crop rotation, animal husbandry, and soil management. His argument was self-serving but not wrong: prosperous farmers would ship more grain, and more grain meant more revenue for the Great Northern.

The two railroads competed fiercely for freight contracts, passenger traffic, and political influence in Pierre. For Aberdeen, the competition was a gift. Competing carriers kept rates lower and service more reliable than the company towns further west that were captive to a single line.

The twentieth century reversed both railroads' fortunes. The Great Northern merged into Burlington Northern in nineteen seventy. The Milwaukee Road, battered by debt from an ill-fated electrified extension to the Pacific, filed for bankruptcy in nineteen seventy-seven and abandoned its transcontinental route by nineteen eighty. Its Aberdeen operations wound down, and an era ended.

Today freight trains still run through Aberdeen, and the old Milwaukee Road depot still stands. The grain still moves, but by a calculus of consolidation those original rail promoters would barely recognize.