Armstrong County, South Dakota

Armstrong County is the name shared by two defunct counties that existed in Dakota Territory and South Dakota from 1873 to 1879 and again from 1883 to 1952.

Armstrong was first created by the Dakota Territorial Legislature in 1873 in the southeastern part of the state, taking its territory from Charles Mix County and Hutchinson County. The county was short lived and never fully organized. In 1879 it was annexed into Hutchinson County.

In 1883 Dakota Territory created a new county west of the Missouri River and named it Pyatt County. The county was formed from unorganized lands and parts of Cheyenne, Dewey (then named Rusk) and Stanley Counties. The county was never formally organized, and was attached to Stanley County for governmental purposes. In 1895, the county was renamed Armstrong in honor of Moses K. Armstrong, a pioneer in the territory who lobbied for territorial organization and later served in the Territorial Legislature and as a territorial delegate to the United States House of Representatives. The county originally covered much of the southern part of what is now the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. In 1898 part of the county was annexed to Stanley County to the south. The western portion was lost when Ziebach County was created in 1911.

In 1940 Armstrong was the only county in the nation without a post office. A decade later it had the distinction of being the only county in the United States without a single civilian federal employee. Spiritual Mobilization, a group opposed to government spending, wrote a song about it:

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