I was surfing YouTube last night…and came upon some interesting videos. There was a very neat series called “Abandoned North Dakota”-these were made by a couple of Fargo , ND radio hosts, who went out to visit abandoned towns in ND.
Many of these little towns were abandoned long ago-the houses had collapsed. But some were pretty recent-many houses had intact roofs and windows.
My questions: when did this trend start? I suppose some of these towns died because the smaller famers sold off their land when they retired…and the collapse of land prices in the 1980’s dealt many others a death blow.
Are towns still being abandoned now? North Dakota seems to have a slowly declining population-is it likely that a lot more little towns will be gone forever?
This fascinating article should help you out. In short:
–a lot of these towns really shouldn’t have been settled to begin with. The climate of North Dakota means farming can very quickly become unprofitable.
–consolidation of farms means you need a lot less people to produce the same amout of foodstuffs
–few people these days want to work 12-14 hours farming or live in isolated small towns.
If you want to know more about specific ghost towns in the Dakotas, check out this site.
Technological improvements in transport and logistics meant that farm products could be moved farther in a shorter amount of time, so fewer little towns were needed as collection and distribution points. On the incoming side, the rise of Wal-Mart and other big-box stores meant that locals no longer had to depend on small shops in little towns for their needs.
The first answer that came to my mind is that most towns on the prairies popped up when the railroad went in, and died out when the highway went somewhere else.
ETA: I don’t know about climate making farming not viable in North Dakota - Saskatchewan and Manitoba are directly north of it, and they produce grains for the world.
Or because the particular branch line was shut down due to railroad cost-cutting.
Maybe Saskatchewan (et al.) has already gone through the consolidation phase and N. Dakota is lagging behind. From what my Dad says, the towns around where his family farms have declined in prosperity somewhat since he was a kid (although they’ve rebounded a bit due to an upsurge in oil activity in Western Saskatchewan).
Not ND specific, but great plains in general:
The early part of the 20th century featured abnormally high precipitation. Many farming towns sprang up. Mechanization (tractors) increased the amount of land that a man could work, and vast areas were put under cultivation.
Then the drought and dust storms of the 1930s hit. Many farmers, and entire towns went bust. Some hung on for years or even decades, but without the large scale agriculture they were built on, the die was cast.
Cite:
Timothy Egan “The Worst Hard Time”
http://www.amazon.com/Worst-Hard-Time-Survived-American/dp/061834697X
Perhaps my Google-fu is weak, but I seem to recall even if I can’t find a comment somewhere that towns were set up every 30 miles or so along a rail road to provide water for the trains. Anything like the truth?
You also need coal. It’s true along the railroad from Salt Lake City to Glenwood Springs CO.
My favorite such stretch is from Salt Lake to Las Vegas. There is a series of N-S mountain ranges that run along most of the route. All the towns are right up against the mountains, because that is where the water is. I-15 runs right along the foothills so as to service these towns.
But when they put in the railroad, the ran it 20-50 further out. So as to take advantage of the flat desert valley floors. And all along the route there are now ghost towns every 25-30 miles.
I drive I-15 from Las Vegas to northern Utah occasionally, but I’m not sure what you meant by “they ran it 20-50 further out.” Could you go into more detail and fill in the missing unit of measurement? I find those railroad tracks running along the highway off in the distance quite fascinating, especially when I see a train chugging along in the same direction I’m going.
Partly, because all those settlers were bamboozled by the railroads, although perhaps not intentionally. The Great Northern, which was the railroad that serviced North Dakota and northern Montana, took none of the generous government subsidies or land grants that the other transcontinental railroads took. Their strategy was to encourage and help people (mostly fresh immigrants) homestead along the route, creating communities that would be utterly dependent on the railroad. James J Hill, the founder, got the nickname the “empire builder” because of this, which is a name still carried by the Amtrak train on the route.
North Dakota and northern Montana was some of the last even remotely arable land that was open to free homesteading. The land was certainly far from prime, especially with the common farming practices at the time, but the homestead act granted much larger allotments in the plains. The railroad, sincerely or not, spent huge amounts of money promoting the potential of dry-land agriculture and the theory of “rain follows the plow”, which seems laughable now but was gaining some traction then. They particularly advertised in Eastern Europe where various problems there were spurring immigration to the US.
At first, unusually good weather and nutrients that had been stored in the soil made for some pretty good years. But after World War I, agricultural commodity prices crashed and the farmers that didn’t go bust had to go deep into debt trying to expand production with equipment and buying more land. Around 1930, the same soil problems that lead to the dustbowl in the whole middle of the country combined with some particularly bad weather killed most of the remaining farms. During the Depression various government programs kept some folks on the land (usually not actually farming) and kept the towns afloat. But after World War II, a lot of those programs dried up and post-war prosperity elsewhere meant most folks didn’t want to stay anyways. That’s when a lot of those little ghost towns died for good, but some of them have just been dying slow deaths ever since.
Now, agriculture is very possible in the region. The area yields some of the best wheat crops in the world, both in terms of quality and quantity. But it’s only possible with some very capital-intensive equipment and soil management techniques that drastically reduce the yield per acre but are necessary to preserve the soil. Even then it’s a very risky proposition, since both the climate in the region and market prices of the relatively low-value crops they’re growing are very unpredictable.
A wheat farmer I know out in eastern Montana once told me that the big difference between Alberta and Saskatchewan versus Montana and the Dakotas today is that the high plains look pretty crummy compared to the US Midwest and Southeast, whereas they’re some of the best agricultural land in Canada. So the Canadian government since the war has been much more actively trying to make cold dryland farming a profitable and less risky proposition, which is why you’ve got ghost towns on one side of the line and the breadbasket of a nation on the other. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s probably a lot of the reason why the Canadian side is doing generally much better, whereas the towns on the US side live and die based on changes in climate, prices and government policy.
That’s really interesting; looking at a map, it’s not obvious why SK and MB would be grain-growing giants, and North Dakota isn’t.
My moms hometown has been slowly dying since the 1950’s. At one time it served the local oil workers and their families. I think the population reached 5000 by the 1930’s. It’s been under a 1000 since I was a kid in the 70’s. Last census reports 822.
They lost a lot of the remaining business in the early 80’s. The grocery, drugstore, hardware store all closed after the owners died. No one was interested in taking over. The downtown area is blocks of empty buildings. Very depressing. I remember buying stuff at the hardware. The grocer raised his own beef, butchered it himself, and sold it in his store. Best beef in that part of the state for over 40 years. All gone now.
The town would be nearly empty. It’s been saved by people from another town (30,000) that wanted cheap land and a safe place to raise kids. It’s a 12 mile drive for them to work.
Who owns the land of these abandoned towns? Are the lots still owned privately or are they owned by the banks or counties (tax deeds)?
I’m not Bartman, but perhaps s/he’ll come back to clarify…
I read this as “20-50 [miles] further out [away from the foothills (and towns) and closer to the middle of the valleys]. So as to take advantage of the flat desert valley floors.”
I’ll say that in some of the shriveling towns in SD, there are some really classic and well preserved houses for sale dirt cheap; it you’re looking for a place to end your days in peace and tranquility, you can do much worse. Bring a four wheel drive vehicle and snow blowing/plowing equipment.
Once you get north of Nephi, the train tracks meet up with I-15. But south of Nephi, they are indeed 15-20 miles to the east. Check out Google Maps.
Beyond questions of weather, rail roads, flight of educated youth, just maybe Meredith Wilson touched on part of the cause:
Why it’s the Model T Ford made the trouble,
Made the people wanna go, wanna get, wanna get,
Wanna get up and go seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve,
Fourteen, twenty-two, twenty-three miles to the county seat.
Yes sir, yes sir.
Who’s gonna patronize the little bitty two by four kinda store any more?
Another major factor in the death of a small town on the plains is school consolidation. I’ve seen it many times. Two or three towns all within say a fifteen mile radius will decide to consolidate their schools districts into a central organization and one facility. Kids get bussed in as needed. During the consolidation process the towns fight tooth and nail to be the host for the new consolidated school and the ones that lose the fight just tend to dry up and disappear. Businesses can close and even some basic services can decline and you can still find people to live there. If your kids need to spend ninety minutes on a bus each way to get to school then it becomes nearly impossible to keep families around.
heres an interesting article from National Geographic magazine