Our Opinion/The land and the people hold memories..

Editorial | February 25th, 2016

There are multiple photographers throughout the state who have taken it upon themselves to explore the roads less travelled in hopes of documenting and exploring not only the landscape but small towns on the brink of disappearing from both our sight and our memory.

It’s hard to imagine that less than 100 years ago a town could be booming, with multiple banks, opera houses, blacksmith shops, schools, etc., but now all that’s left of these communities are crumbling structures and overgrown stone foundations -- if that. For example, Omemee, North Dakota, was the fourth largest town in Bottineau County in 1906, but in 1990 fewer than 100 years later it was disincorporated as a town with a population of zero.

A friend and fellow writer here at HPR, Jack Dura and I stopped by yet another ghost town in central North Dakota while on a photo venture in western North Dakota to explore the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (Dura’s photo essay ran maybe two weeks ago). Unfortunately, we found ourselves fighting daylight as we trudged through knee high snow drifts and we were greeted with the sounds of cows bellering and coyotes howling in the distance, which some find may find worrisome and I find comforting.

Weeks later, Dura eventually made his way back to photograph the crumbling church there. The fact that it was still standing is a near miracle considering the foundation is half gone. Naturally we compared photos (I had been there four years earlier with a fellow photographer with the same mission) and realized that within a mere four years it had lost another basement wall and it’s standing on borrowed time. Which should serve as some kind of metaphor... use it as you will .

How long will it be before the structure crumbles? If a building crumbles in the middle of the prairie and no one is there to hear it -- does it still make a sound?

Once you come across these structures and crumbling foundations you can’t help but wonder what happened. How does a booming community turn into a ghost town, and how has its history been preserved?

Many of these towns had firm railroad and agricultural ties. Once the trains stopped passing through, and the shiny new black top of the Interstate blazed through the prairie in the mid-’50s, small towns that thrived on highway business, and railroad vocations started to die out. Large scale farms eventually beat out the small farmer and more and more North Dakota offspring showed disinterest in carrying on the torch of the family farm.

Thankfully there are books and sites like “Ghosts of North Dakota,” that generate an online conversation about these communities. Not only do Troy Larson and Terry Hinnenkamp (the minds behind “Ghosts of North Dakota”) do their research, former members of the those communities reach out to them and share their memories, stories, and or ephemera.

Often times county museums end up with trinkets donated or salvaged from these communities; let’s think of them as relics. Sometimes they have a plaque with a cherished community member’s name and it serves as a memorial for both the community and the individual.

“The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain—they keep old things that never grow old.”

-Carl Sandburg, “The Prairie”, 1926

RECENTLY IN

Recently in: