Editing Amboy, Minnesota (section)

==History==
Shelby Township was organized in 1858, the year Minnesota achieved statehood.  The township's main inducement to settlement was its rich prairie loam, rendered still more attractive by the availability of wood lots along the Blue Earth River.  By 1860, Shelby Township was the most populous in Blue Earth County.  In addition to its 315 residents, it also sustained a small but thriving village known as ''Shelbyville'', located in Section 35, about two miles south of modern Amboy.  In the early 1860s Shelbyville hosted the county fair.  The town included a hotel, church, schoolhouse, mill, two stores, a blacksmith shop, a wagon shop, and a post office.<ref name="Upham2001">{{cite book|last=Upham|first=Warren|title=Minnesota Place Names: A Geographical Encyclopedia|publisher=Minnesota Historical Society Press|location=Saint Paul, Minnesota|year=2001|edition=3|pages=67|isbn=978-0-87351-396-8}}</ref><ref name="HAER" />

By 1875, Shelby Township was a relatively mature agricultural area, well known for grains and livestock.  At that time, the township's population was 800, and it remained at approximately the same level for the next thirty years.  Despite such overall stability, there were some significant population shifts within the township itself.

The main catalyst for change was the [[St. Paul and Sioux City Railway]] (later a part of the [[Omaha Road]]), which in 1879 built a north-south branch line through Blue Earth County.  In several townships along the proposed route, residents offered the railroad financial incentives to locate a depot in their vicinity including donated land and a red cow with a broken horn.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Schrader |first=Julie |title=The Heritage of Blue Earth County |publisher=Curtis Media Corporation |year=1990 |pages=470–471}}</ref>  For reasons that are not completely clear, the citizens of Shelbyville declined to do so.  On September 2, 1879, they voted down a proposition to give the railroad a $10,000 grant.  A week earlier, however, a group of farmers residing two miles north of Shelbyville had made the railroad an offer of their own.

The farmers' proposal, which was accepted, was to buy forty acres of land for the railroad, if the railroad would lay out town lots, build a depot, and build a grain elevator.  The town, named Amboy, was laid out in October 1879.  This triggered the death of Shelbyville, which was deserted within three years, the buildings having been moved to other locations.  Incorporating as a city in 1887, Amboy had more than 400 inhabitants by the turn of the century.<ref name="HAER">{{cite web|url=http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.mn0412 |title=Dodd Ford Bridge, County Road 147 Spanning Blue Earth River, Amboy vicinity, Blue Earth County, MN |year=1993|work=Historic American Engineering Record|publisher=Library of Congress|accessdate=January 17, 2010}}</ref>