Grand View

Grand View lost the county to a town named for a Chicago meatpacker. The Milwaukee Road's first train reached Armour on October 8, 1886, carrying lumber, coal and goods for a depot, roundhouse, turntable and stockyards. The town took the name of Philip D. Armour, whom the legislature's 2011 commemoration calls chairman of that railroad; he gave a bell to the Congregational church, and the town never had a packing plant. Armour has held the Douglas County seat since, and counted 698 people in 2020.

What the plaque says

Grand View 1882-1894 A great town while it lasted, Grand View became Douglas County's third county seat when it won out over Huston, the second and Douglas City by 11 votes in 1882. Brownsdale the first, a phantom city, had been a brief but expensive luxury. Grand View was platted that August 21st, by Kingsley G. Foster, Joe Devy and Rufus D. Prescott, the commissioners first met in the Foster-Devy store which continued to be the Court- house for 12 years. It was on the Ft. Randall-Mitchell and Scotland-Plankinton Stage lines and until the railroad reached Armour in 1886, the undisputed metropolis of that area. A village of intense rivalries, Upper Grand View, the original plat, the darling of the "King" Foster-Joe Devy interests, had a bank, the D. C. Chronicle (Democratic, then Republican), a church, hotels, the courthouse and the Silver Cornet Band. Lower Grand View to its south and west and slightly lower, matched it in every particular with the S. D. Tribune (Republican), the post office in lieu of the courthouse and the Martial Band. Those bands would play at the drop of a hat to show who was who in Grand View. George W. Atwood, an original Lower Town sponsor deserted that section for Upper Town in 1885, the only dereliction. When Armour got the railroad, the exodus started but Grand View, a trifle closer to the center of the County, survived two close elections until in 1894, it had to give up the ghost. Being the county seat, it never bothered with a local Government. Erected 1961 by the Douglas County Commissioners Grand View Erected 1961 by the Douglas County Commissioners

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Corn Palace — 28 mi
  The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.
• Fort Randall — 28 mi
  The ruined stone chapel of an 1856 Missouri River post below Fort Randall Dam, where Sitting Bull and his band were held as prisoners for two years.
• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 29 mi
  A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.

More markers nearby

• Original Site of New Home Lutheran Church — 21 mi
• Stratosphere Balloon Landing — 22 mi
• Fort Randall Map — 25 mi
• Fort Randall Chapel — 25 mi