Watertown: Where the First Governor Got His Start

Watertown traces its origins to August eighteen seventy-eight, when the Winona and Saint Peter Railroad extended its tracks west and a settlement called Kampeska became the first seat of Codington County. When the rails advanced to the Big Sioux River later that year, the entire town picked up and moved to meet them, adopting a new name borrowed from Watertown, New York. In eighteen eighty, a lawyer and politician named Arthur Mellette opened a land office in the new Watertown.

He had come to Dakota Territory looking for opportunity, and he found it: Mellette eventually served as the last governor of Dakota Territory and then, when South Dakota achieved statehood in eighteen eighty-nine, became the first governor of the new state. Watertown grew steadily as German and Norwegian settlers poured into Codington County in the early nineteen hundreds, and today it is one of the larger cities in the northeastern part of the state. The glacial lakes scattered across the surrounding prairies give this corner of South Dakota some of its most scenic countryside.