Murray County was established in 1857 and formally organized in 1872. Although Currie was the original county seat, the city of Slayton won a contentious battle for that title in 1890. Agricultural production has been (and continues to be in the twenty-first century) the county’s primary industry.
The area established in 1857 as Murray County by the Minnesota Territorial Legislature is a thirty-by-twenty-four-mile rectangle consisting of 720 total square miles in southwest Minnesota. It was named after William Porter “Pitt” Murray, a member of the Territorial House of Representatives.
Archeological evidence confirms the existence of people in the area during the Late Prehistoric Period (1000–1700 CE). Named for the excavation site that yielded evidence of an early settlement, the Great Oasis People occupied a small woodland area surrounded by a complex of lakes in the northwestern corner of the county. The fate of this group is unknown, and the region appears to have been abandoned by 1200 CE.
By the time the first white people arrived in the area, the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota were its primary inhabitants. In 1831 Philander Prescott was the first European to visit. In 1832, the American Fur Company established a trading post at the Great Oasis site, which Métis trader Joseph LaFramboise managed from 1833 to 1838. The first white immigrants in the county lived around Lake Shetek.
When the US–Dakota War began in August 1862, the small settlement at Lake Shetek was drawn into the conflict when a small band of Dakota warriors attacked on August 20. Fourteen immigrants were killed, and the rest either fled or were taken prisoner (all were subsequently released).
White immigrants were slow in returning to Murray County. The 1870 census indicates the presence of 210 persons. But the trickle of newcomers soon became a flood. In 1880 there were 3,604 people living in the county, and by 1900 there were 11,911 persons. Many of these were New England Yankees, but there were also Scandinavians, Germans, and Canadians of French or Scotch ancestry.
Immigration increased with the establishment of two Catholic colonies. The first was Avoca (which included the towns of Iona and Fulda), founded in 1878 by Bishop John Ireland through the Catholic Colonization Bureau. The second was the Sweetman Catholic Colony in Currie, founded in 1881 by John Sweetman and the Irish-American Colonization Company. The colonists were primarily of German and Irish origin.
As the population grew it became necessary to formally organize the county. In 1872 the county was platted, the first five townships organized, and commissioners elected for the first time. Currie, the county’s first town, was designated the county seat.
An additional fifteen townships (for a total of twenty) were organized over the course of the following decade. Besides Currie (1872), Avoca (1878), Iona (1878), and Fulda (1881), another seven towns were founded in the county: Hadley (1879), Lake Wilson (1883), Chandler (1886), Slayton (platted in 1881, incorporated in 1887), Lime Creek (1888), Dovray (1904), and Wirock (1909).
The arrival of two railroad lines in 1879 promoted immigration and development of the county. Most of the county’s towns founded in the 1880s and early 1900s originated as depots along these routes. A third terminal branch line that ended in Currie was completed in 1900.
In 1886 a petition was filed to relocate the county seat and courthouse from Currie to Slayton, marking the beginning of a contentious four-year battle. After a series of public petitions, elections, and court cases, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in favor of removing the county seat to Slayton in June 1890.
The number of farms increased along with the growing population. Agricultural production has been (and continues to be) the county’s primary industry. In 1870 there were just fifteen farms totaling 2,407 acres. By 1900 there were 1,713 farms totaling 385,061 acres. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wheat was the primary crop, along with oats and barley. Corn replaced small grains as the county’s primary crop in the 1920s. Soybeans, which first appear as a Murray County crop in the 1930 US Agricultural Census, were the county’s second major crop by the mid-1960s.
Increased agricultural production was made possible partly through the large-scale drainage of the county’s wetlands in the early twentieth century. In about 1904 farmers filed the first petition requesting the construction of county ditches that would drain wetlands in order to put more land into agricultural production. This initiated a twenty-year period of intense ditch digging, resulting in the draining of nearly 40,000 acres of wetlands in the county.
Population continued to increase in the twentieth century, peaking in 1940 with 15,060 residents. New businesses expanded the county’s economic base. These included the Des Moines River Cement and Tile Works (known as the Phelan Tile Factory) and the Silvernale Tile Factory in Currie, Huisken Meat Center (now Monogram Foods) in Chandler, and the short-lived Slayton Boat factory in the 1950s. The US Air Force operated the Chandler Air Base from 1951 to 1969. Teepeotah Resort and Valhalla Island resort on Lake Shetek attracted tourists from the 1890s onward.
Changes in agriculture prompted changes in the economy and demographics of Murray County as the twentieth century progressed. Mechanization and technological advances, improved livestock breeding, as well as the development of hybrid seeds, crop genetics, fertilizers and pesticides resulted in increased agricultural production. Farmers became more specialized, resulting in increased efficiency. Hog confinements, beef feedlots, and large-scale dairy operations replaced small, diversified farms. The size of the average farm increased in size from 210 acres in 1940 to 339 acres in 1992.
While the size of the average farm grew, the number of actual farms declined and with it the number of farmers. The number of farms peaked in 1940 with 2,100. By 1974 that number had fallen to 1,228 and by 2012 it was just 895 total farms—about half as many as there had been in 1940. From its peak of 15,060 residents in 1940 the county’s population also began a slow but steady decline, losing from a few hundred residents to a few thousand per decade. In 2010, the county’s population was 8,725.
A shrinking number of students prompted the realignment of the county’s school districts through closures and consolidation. Most one-room schools closed in the late 1950s and students bussed to schools in nearby towns. All four of the county’s Catholic schools—in Iona, Fulda, Avoca, and Currie—closed as well. In 1992 a tornado extensively damaged the Chandler-Lake Wilson High School, resulting in the district’s consolidation with Slayton and the creation of Murray County Central school district. As of 2017, two private and two public elementary schools and two high schools (Fulda and Murray County Central) remain.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought more changes to Murray County. Its population has become more diverse. In 2016, just over 5 percent of the county’s residents were of Latino or Hispanic origin. Agriculture continues to be the main industry, but there are other businesses as well, including Finley Engineering and the Murray County Medical Center in Slayton. Renewable energy has also diversified the county’s economy. The Chanarambie Wind Farm near Chandler, established in 2003 and comprising over sixty wind turbines, produces more than 80,000 megawatts of electricity annually.