[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".

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.

This slide continued into the Great Depression as the line lay idle and more residents were forced to close their businesses and move elsewhere to find work.

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.

It managed to survive winds at the time estimated to be up to 260 mph (418 km/h)[5] and measured a barometric pressure fall of around 100 millibars near the center of the half-mile wide tornado.

[citation needed] 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.