Emery, SD

Emery is a Hanson County city in southeast South Dakota, four miles south of Interstate 90 along South Dakota Highway 262 and about twenty minutes from Mitchell. The city was named for Sloan Miller Emery, who filed a tree claim in 1879 that included the original town site. The Emery post office opened in 1881, the original forty-acre plat was dated September 29, 1883, and the railroad built a sidetrack that same year. An elevator and blacksmith shop followed, giving the new town the basic pieces of a farm and rail center.

An 1884 atlas described Emery with a school, Catholic church, post office, stores, blacksmith shop, grain elevator, and warehouse. A hotel, depot, lumberyard, newspaper, bank, creamery, and additional elevators appeared as the settlement grew. Today Emery's city park includes a swimming pool, baseball and softball fields, and tennis courts, while the surrounding agricultural land still sets the scale of the local map. The town's early layout grew from a land claim and a rail siding, and those two beginnings remain visible in its streets, businesses, and open horizon.