Aurora County enjoyed a booming economy in the 1880s, while drought and economic devastation marked the 1890s. By 1900, the drought was over, and the area started recovering. With a combination of new families moving in, established families increasing in size, better weather, and high market prices, the area prospered again. In the county profile of 1904, changing farming methods were also given some of the credit: “Mixed farming and stock raising had taken the place of wheat farming, and the milk pail and farm dairy had replaced the plow and threshing machine.” By that time, the population had recovered, land values were improving, and “farmers generally are prosperous and contented.”
In the early years of the twentieth century, technological improvements changed the quality of life by improving comfort, reducing travel time, and enhancing communication. Farm families were early adopters of telephones as well as motor vehicles and gas motors for farm operations. In the early years, when Sarah Page of Dudley Township sent someone sixteen miles to the nearest town for the weekly shopping trip, the journey took an entire day by horse and wagon, three to four hours in each direction. With a car, that same trip in one direction might take half an hour or less. With cars came better roads. The first cars appeared in Aurora County in about 1909. Two years later, the Stickney newspaper boasted that townspeople owned twenty cars and two motorcycles in that town of 324 people.
The introduction of telephones allowed women the chance to talk to other women on a more frequent basis and to summon help much more quickly. By 1906, the telephone company in the town of Stickney was planning work on rural lines. In January 1909, local farmers organized to create the Pleasant Lake and Dudley Telephone Co., becoming one of seven rural lines connecting in Stickney. Several businesses installed gasoline light plants in 1912, and steam heat replaced coal in the Stickney schoolhouse. While the towns developed infrastructure for indoor plumbing and electrical wiring, farm wives were still decades away from enjoying that technology.
According to the 1915 state census, the people in Aurora County were mostly white, literate, young, religious, and rural. The population of Aurora County was a blend of people who, themselves, their parents or their grandparents, had immigrated mostly from midwestern states or Northern Europe. A small wave of immigration after the 1895 exodus added to the population of people born in Holland, Denmark, and Sweden, although the Germans and Norwegians were still the two largest ethnic groups.
By 1915, three of four persons claimed a religious affiliation, with more than thirteen denominations identified. Close to 40 percent of the population called themselves Roman Catholic or Lutheran. Farming was the main occupation, with 73 percent of all males over the age of ten years, and not in school, listing farmer as their occupation. Of the 1,192 females over the age of ten years, engaged in a useful occupation, and not in school, 35 percent called themselves farmers, while 42 percent identified their occupation as housewife. The populace was, for the most part, homogenous. They were all of the same race, most had the same educational status, their ethnicity was predominately Northern European, their religions were Christian, and farming was the basis of the economy.
Epidemic, war, and fights for suffrage had impact on life in Aurora County in the decade starting in 1910, as they did everywhere in the country. An outbreak of influenza, the Spanish flu, hit the county with a vengeance. In the two years from July 1918 to June 1920, the county reported 1,097 cases of influenza and pneumonia, affecting 15 percent of the population. Twenty-eight people died from the Spanish flu, accounting for two-thirds of all deaths in the county from contagious diseases.
Mothers sent their sons to a war where disease was more fatal to county men than were enemy guns. Twenty-five men from Aurora County were killed or wounded in the twenty months between the time the United States entered World War I and the armistice. Seven died from disease, five from contracting influenza in American camps. Six lost their lives on the battlefields. Another twelve were wounded in action. Early in the war, women had actively organized to support the war effort. In South Dakota, women’s active involvement enhanced their credibility as citizens and helped South Dakota women win the right to suffrage in 1918. As the decade ended, and the population reached a peak of 7,246, falling prices, unsustainable debt, failing banks, drought, and depression were still in the future. At the time, war’s end, farm profits, and new voting rights were cause for community celebration.
For thousands of years, Aurora County’s grasslands served as habitat for animal species and hunting grounds for native people. In 1880, immigrants from midwestern states and Northern Europe changed the area to a land of farms on plots of land about one-half-mile square. The first decade provided adventure and profits, while the second decade brought despair and poverty. Rains, profits, and technology improved the lives of the residents in the third and fourth decades, until the land, the climate, and the economy no longer could support the population.
Forty years after the first residents tilled the virgin soil, the population was in a decline, from which there would be no recovery. But, in those early years, the pioneers developed the foundation for community, a community that was essential to sustaining those families and their descendants, along with new families, who continued to farm the land through many more cycles of profit and loss, success and failure, joy and despair.
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It Happened Right Here: Foundation for Community, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, June 23, 2016.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 