Merrill Creek Centennial
1896 · 1996
One Hundred Years on the Prairie
Merrill Creek, South Dakota

Thank You! Posted Sunday, July 7, 1996 What a weekend. On behalf of the whole Centennial Committee, thank you to everyone who came home to Merrill Creek on June 28, 29 and 30, and to everyone who worked so hard to get us ready. By our best count about 3,100 people came through town over the three days. That's more than five times our population, and I believe we fed every one of them at least twice. Some numbers for those who couldn't be here: 87 entries in the Grand Parade, which ran 52 minutes from the elevator to the park. 641 alumni registered for the all-school reunion, from 31 states and one from Norway. The oldest was a member of the Class of 1926. $4,385 raised at the pie auction for the new roof on the park shelter. The top pie, a sour cream raisin, went for $310. The baker would like it known that she did not bid on it herself. The street dance went until 1:15 a.m., and the band played two encores because nobody would go home. The time capsule was sealed at 2:40 p.m. on Sunday and set in the base of the new flagpole in the park. It will be opened on our 150th birthday, fifty years from now. I hope some of you will be there to open it. I plan to be watching. Our thanks as well to the fire department for the pancake breakfast and the fireworks, to the Legion for the supper, to every church in town for Sunday, and to the county highway crew, who put up with a lot of us asking where to park. Parade photos and the time capsule list coming soon. Lillian Ford, Secretary Merrill Creek Centennial Committee

I. The Railroad
Merrill Creek exists because the railroad needed a town every eight or ten miles along its new branch line, and in the summer of 1896 it needed one here. The railroad's surveyors platted the town site on the east bank of the creek, named the creek and the town both for a surveyor named Merrill whom nobody now remembers anything else about, and sold the lots at auction that fall. By the next summer there were a depot, two general stores, a lumberyard, a hotel, a blacksmith, a newspaper and a congregation meeting in the depot waiting room on Sundays until it could build a church.

II. The First Elevator
The first grain elevator went up beside the tracks in 1898. Before that, farmers hauled their wheat by wagon to the next town east, a full day there and back. The elevator changed everything: Merrill Creek became the place the farm families came to sell their grain, buy their groceries, go to church and see each other. A second elevator followed in 1909, and by 1920 the town had grown to about 940 people, the most it has ever had. For forty years the elevators were the tallest things you could see for thirty miles, and they still are.

III. The Dust and the Depression
The 1930s nearly finished us. The rains stopped. The topsoil blew, and older residents remember dust drifting against fences like snow and lamps lit at noon. The grasshoppers came in clouds in the middle of the decade and ate what the drought had left, even the handles of the pitchforks. The bank closed in 1931. Family after family loaded what they could and left for the West Coast or the cities, and many never came back. Those who stayed got by on very little and on each other. The WPA built the stone shelter in the park in 1936, and some of the men who laid those stones are the grandfathers of the people who will be shingling its new roof this fall.

IV. The War Years
Sixty-one men and three women from Merrill Creek and the farms around it served in the Second World War. Four did not come home, and their names are on the honor roll at the town hall. At home, the school children collected scrap metal and milkweed pods, the ladies of the churches rolled bandages and packed boxes, and everyone bought bonds. The rains came back in the war years, and with them good crops and better prices, and the town came through its hardest twenty years with its doors open.

V. The School
Merrill Creek High School graduated its first class, four students, in 1912. As the farms grew larger and the families fewer, the classes shrank, and in 1970, after a great deal of hard feeling and a vote of the district, our high school was consolidated with the school in the next town. The Class of 1970 was the last, eleven seniors, and they led the parade this year. The old building is our elementary school now, and the gym is still where the town gathers, which is why the all-school reunion was held there, for everyone who ever went to Merrill Creek High School, from 1912 to 1970.

Make your check payable to the Merrill Creek Centennial Committee and mail it to the committee in care of the Merrill Creek post office. Please print your name and address clearly. The plates are going fast; as of this writing we have fewer than 60 left of the 500 made. The cookbook is in its second printing.

We have met every Tuesday night in the town hall since September of 1994. That's nearly two years of Tuesdays, and I would do every one of them again.

A word about this page: I put it up in March so that our former residents all over the country could find us, and I'm told by my nephew, who set me up with the computer, that a good many of you did. Please sign our guestbook and tell us where you are now and what class you were.

Visitors since March 1996:


Write to the committee: [email protected]
Last updated Sunday, July 7, 1996