 When the railroad came in the fall of 1869, the businesses in town were Samuel Alvin Heard and C. D. Ward's store, William S. Brill's drug store, which became Meeker County's first drug store, the lumber business (but not a lumberyard) owned by Joseph James, a lumberyard owned by John Esbjornsson and Charles Ellis Peterson, Clark L. Angell's photography studio, Chase and Dunn's livery stable, Charles John Ludwig Almquist's hotel called the Litchfield House, and the Railway Land Office managed by Col. Hans Mattson.The lone doctor in town was George W. Weisel, Litchfield's second Village Council President in 1873, but there were three lawyers, Francis “Frank” Belfoy, Newton H. C. Chittenden, and Judge Charles Henry Strobeck.Strobeck, born in New York, was the first lawyer in town and he was Litchfield's eleventh Village Council President in 1882 and seventeenth mayor in 1895.