BROOKINGS – The Brookings County Museum now has a listing on its recently launched website of Brookings County’s homesteaders.

Names from Carry Aaby of Brookings Township to John Zoll of Oslo Township and about 3,500 other homesteaders are listed at www.brookingscountymuseum.org. 

The addition of this research service is part of the museum’s expansion of its Archive Section. It has been vastly improved by volunteers during the museum’s pandemic closure.

Nestled on the list in between homesteaders Aaby and Zoll are 48 Andersons and 56 Johnsons and others who, between the 1870s up to the 1920s, joined the settlement parade, paid an $18 fee, and pledged to improve in five years their 160 acres of the 805 square miles comprising Brookings County. 

The alphabetized homesteader list also includes the legal location, indicating range, township and section where the homesteader settled. 

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862 granting free land to citizens willing to improve the land and pay a fee. Later, to encourage the growth of trees on the sparce prairie land, the Timber Culture Act of 1873 provided another 160 acres of which 40 acres had to be planted with trees.

The purpose was to provide the lumber that settlers would need to improve their homesteads, but also as a source of fuel and as a conservation measure and for ambiance. Later the act was amended requiring just 10 acres of land be planted with trees.

Of the thousands that settled in Brookings County and elsewhere in South Dakota, about 40 percent stayed on and proved up on their land. Many of the homesteads on the Brookings County list reveal that generations of the original family have remained on the homestead.

An interesting aspect of the Brookings County homestead list is that about 32 square miles of land in Lake Hendricks and Oak Lake townships were assigned to the Winona and St. Paul Railroad.

That railroad was one of the first to enter Dakota Territory, responding to the federal government’s inducement of providing vast strips of land to those rail lines taking the chance and making the investment of laying down tracks and establishing depots along the route. 

Organized in 1861, the Winona and St. Paul Railroad laid tracks from Tracy, Minnesota, to Gary, Dakota Territory, and then on to Watertown in what would become South Dakota in 1889. The rail line was later purchased by the Chicago and North Western Railroad, which came along too late to take advantage of the free land offer, and had to speculate. 

Railroads became secretive as to their route plans so that right-of-way land could be bought up at the most favorable price, or donated on promise of future gain to landowners. 

In addition to the list available on the museum website, a hard copy is available for viewing in the Brookings County Museum’s redesigned and refurbished Archives Section. Museum leaders hope the museum can be opened to the public later this year, but that depends on virus control.