No Soo Line for Sheldon

 Fred Underwood was an early mover and shaker in the Sheldon and Enderlin communities. I’ve collected copies of many of his papers on file at the North Dakota Historical Society archives. Here is one of interest.

     “On a Sunday afternoon in August in 1891 Mr. Underwood was sitting on the front steps of a hotel in Sheldon (hotel owned by H. F. Labbit), alone because most of his friends had left town on hunting expeditions. A man on horseback rode up and handed him a note, written by a friend, the late John Kratt of Sheldon and the note read as follows, to whit, ‘There’s a gang of surveyors coming up through the sandhills surveying for a new railroad and it will run a little west of Sheldon. If you fellows in Sheldon want the road to run through Sheldon you had  better get busy.’ That was the first he had heard of the Soo Line Railroad. The business men of Sheldon immediately organized and sent to Minneapolis a committee to negotiate with the officials of the Soo Line. They offered them all sorts of considerations including a free right of way through Ransom County, provided they would run the new line through the village of Sheldon. The committee was unable to accomplish anything and the road was built as now located. A few months thereafter Mr. Underwood sat in a buggy with his future wife and saw the construction crew lay the rails for the Soo Line around the bend and down the hill westward toward Enderlin.”