Manchester, South Dakota
Manchester, South Dakota | ||
---|---|---|
FIPS code 46-40500[1] | | |
GNIS feature ID | 1268540[2] |
Manchester was a small
History
Manchester was originally called Fairview; the present name honors Chester H. Manchester, the town's first postmaster.[3] With the influence of the railroad, Manchester underwent rapid expansion, including the building of "numerous homes, a town hall, grocery stores, livery barns, a lumber yard, two grain elevators, a depot, a restaurant, a cream station, a bank, a pool hall, auto repair, blacksmith shops, gas stations, two churches, a system of township schools including Manchester High School, a hotel, a newspaper and a fabled town pump".[4]
Grace Ingalls Dow, sister of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder, spent a significant part of her adult life in Manchester. She worked as a teacher in the local school and died in 1941. Her sister Mary Ingalls lived with her for a while as well. Laura Ingalls Wilder spent many years (and set several of her Little House books) in De Smet, a similarly sized town seven miles to Manchester's east along the railroad line.[citation needed]
Into the 20th century, the diminishing importance of the
Destruction
On June 24, 2003 a classic supercell thunderstorm spawned a tornado over eastern South Dakota. The tornado gradually matured and widened, forming a large "wedge" shape, and achieving an intensity of F4 on the Fujita scale and a width of between one-half and one mile as it entered Manchester. [citation needed]
The
Manchester was an extremely small and compact town, with the central township abutting the intersection of US Highway 14 and 425th Avenue in rural Kingsbury County and surrounded on all sides by miles of farmland. The tornado struck the town from the south while doing strong F3/weak F4 damage, and was easily powerful enough to destroy the handful of elderly structures remaining in the town center (including the town post office), as well as several outlying buildings along US-14. According to Dan Kight of the Kingsbury County Sheriff's department: "There's a business that's partially left, but everything else is gone," noting only three or four families lived in Manchester. Also according to Kight, some residents were transported to the hospital with injuries.[6]
Storm chaser Tim Samaras placed several "turtle probes" ahead of the tornado's path and one of them scored a direct hit. It recorded a pressure drop of 100 millibars in the span of five seconds, the deepest and fastest pressure drop ever recorded directly by any instrument in a weather event. The gravel was scoured from the road that the probe was placed in by the tornadic winds but when the probe was lifted there was still gravel underneath it.[7]
References
- ^ "U.S. Census website". United States Census Bureau. Retrieved January 31, 2008.
- ^ "US Board on Geographic Names". United States Geological Survey. October 25, 2007. Retrieved January 31, 2008.
- ^ Federal Writers' Project (1940). South Dakota place-names, v.1-3. University of South Dakota. p. 49. Archived from the original on October 27, 2016.
- ^ "Manchester, South Dakota - Ghost Towns on". Waymarking.com. Retrieved May 3, 2022.
- ^ NOAA National Weather Service, Sioux Falls, SD "Record Pressure Drop Recorded with Manchester Tornado", Retrieved on 2009-10-13.
- ^ "Tornado Pummels Small Minnesota Town". CNN.com. June 25, 2003. Retrieved May 7, 2007.
- ^ "Record Pressure Drop Recorded with Manchester Tornado - 24 June 2003". Archived from the original on June 9, 2013.