Merritt is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

in Lawrence County and Pennington County,

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux language, Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state, state in the West North Central states, North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Dakota people, Dakota Sioux ...

United States of America The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguo ...

History

Merritt was a small logging community that once included a school, post office, and a ranger station. It provided fuel and wood for the mines near

Lead Lead () is a chemical element; it has Chemical symbol, symbol Pb (from Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a Heavy metal (elements), heavy metal that is density, denser than most common materials. Lead is Mohs scale, soft and Ductility, malleabl ...

and Deadwood. It has since been abandoned. In the 1970s, all that remained of the town was a

trout Trout (: trout) is a generic common name for numerous species of carnivorous freshwater ray-finned fishes belonging to the genera '' Oncorhynchus'', ''Salmo'' and ''Salvelinus'', all of which are members of the subfamily Salmoninae in the ...

ranch A ranch (from /Mexican Spanish) is an area of landscape, land, including various structures, given primarily to ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle and sheep. It is a subtype of farm. These terms are most often ap ...

.Parker, Watson, and Hugh K. Lambert. ''Black Hills Ghost Towns.'' First ed. Vol. 1. Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press Incorporated, 1974. 134. 1 vols. Print.

Geography

The old site is located on the county line between Pennington and Lawrence Counties in the US state of South Dakota, on the west side of US 385. Merritt is inside of the Black Hills. It was located at the southern end of the Black Hills & Fort Pierre Railroad. It was 18 miles north of Hill City. Its

elevation The elevation of a geographic location (geography), ''location'' is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational equipotenti ...

is .

References

{{Pennington County, South Dakota Ghost towns in South Dakota