Charles Hallock, a New York naturalist and writer, praised the area that became Hallock as "a Sportsman's Paradise," wrote about its birds, grasses, flora, and wildlife for major publications, founded Forest and Stream in 1873, and after first visiting northwestern Minnesota around 1875 pursued a farm colony for sportsmen in Kittson County with plans for a large hotel and summer cottages. The town of Hallock was incorporated in 1887, and Hotel Hallock, completed in 1880, helped promote the area until it burned without insurance on Christmas Eve 1892 and Hallock chose not to rebuild it. Railroad executive James J. Hill, known as "The Empire Builder," led railroad lines that passed through Hallock and played a major role in settling the area, and he built a house in nearby Northcote where his son Walter Hill lived. Long before and during settlement, Indigenous people including Cree, Assiniboine, Lakota (Sioux), and Ojibwe (Chippewa) traversed the region, while in the 1800s Métis people, descendants of Europeans, mainly French trappers, and Indian women primarily from the Pembina and Red Lake Band, settled in St. Vincent north of Hallock and, along with local Ojibwe, frequently visited Hallock, where Axel Lindegard recorded details of Ojibwe visits in his diary because they regularly traded at the Lindegard Bros. store. Hallock was also home to Frederick McKinley "Casey" Jones, the first African American to receive the National Medal of Technology, awarded posthumously in 1991, who cofounded ThermoKing and earned more than 60 patents for refrigeration technology, x-ray machines, ticket-dispensing machines, engines, and sound equipment, including portable cooling units such as refrigerated trailers and rail car containers and sound-on-film equipment for movie theaters. Hallock also saw Minnesota's first indoor ice rink built in 1894, and in 1995 some scenes of Fargo were filmed there and nearby because the rest of the state lacked snow.