The Homestead Boom and Bust of the Eighteen Eighties
Near Aberdeen, South Dakota
The Dakota boom of the early eighteen eighties was one of the most intense land rushes in American history. Thousands of settlers poured into Brown County in less than five years, lured by railroad promotional literature promising black soil, reliable rain, and one hundred sixty-acre homesteads under the eighteen sixty-two Homestead Act.
The promotional literature was not entirely wrong about the soil. It was wrong about the rain. The drought that began in eighteen eighty-eight emptied towns that had barely finished building. Aberdeen held on because the railroads needed it. Smaller communities simply vanished. Dozens of post offices opened in Brown County before eighteen eighty-five and closed before nineteen hundred. Their names are preserved in the state historical archives and nowhere else.
