Abandoned Prairie Towns: What Caused It?

Factual Questions
21

Thank you wevets. Miles would indeed be the unit I left undefined.

The main line stays well west of Nephi. From Nephi you would have to go 33 miles west to Lynndyl to the main line. But you are right there is a secondary, more recent line that serves Utah and Salt Lake counties that runs more or less parallel to I-15.

The original main line ran, and still runs west out of Salt Lake, south through Tooele valley, down through Delta, Milford, Lund, Beryl, then swings way west to avoid the rough terrain north and west of St George, before it finally it cuts south and rejoins I-15 about 20 miles north of Vegas.

And all along that route you can find ghost towns every 25 or 30 miles or so. Although a lot of them were never much more than a single building. Without the need for a coaling and/or watering station they just weren’t needed.

22

Was I the only one who read the title as “prairie dog towns”? Because we aren’t the only species out there with this problem.

23

Rainfall, maybe? Just a guess.

24

Because it’s much easier for the North Dakotans to head south? They have no international border to deal with before they get to the warm country.

25

Ah, the “stuck in Canada” theory. :slight_smile:

26

Do we actually know what North Dakota’s grain-growing status is? A decline of small towns does not necessarily mean a decline in farming. Also, North Dakota’s overall economy is humming just now; it has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, if memory serves.

27

It’s not just the northern prairies. There are hundreds of struggling or abandoned cotton towns in Texas that saw their best days in the 1920s, when the economy was booming, rainfall was high, and there was a massive demand for cotton to make clothing for America’s booming middle-class.

28

Bingo!

North Dakota is still the leading producer of hard red spring wheat (mostly used for things like pasta), and is one of the leading producers of wheat in general.

Why do small towns die in North Dakota? Farm consolidation and mechanization and improved roads. Farms are constantly getting larger, but with mechanization they require fewer workers. That means that small towns have a less-populated hinterland from which to get business, and fewer kids for the local school. Add better roads to that, and you have the small remaining population traveling further to shop at better stores in larger cities. When the shops close and the school consolidates somewhere else, the town dies.

Railroads don’t help out. BNSF, which is the big player in North Dakota, wants to load big, 100+ car unit trains at big, central elevators, not smaller cuts of grain cars at little, local elevators. They give the big elevators better rates, and first dibs on grain cars, and farmers (using those better roads) tend to truck their grain to the big elevators. When the smaller, local grain elevator goes out of business, that is the end of a big part of a small town’s tax base.

The end result is that the land is there, and it’s still productively farmed. It just doesn’t require the people and infrastructure it once did.

29

Was it ND that had a neo-homesteading plan? I recall reading a few years ago that some towns in some Plains state were attempting to attract new blood with free land and other perks.

30

Saskatchewan towns have tried that, too (town lots for free or for $1).

31

Yes, but such immigrants rarely last. Most have real difficulties fitting into an insular society where everyone not only knows everyone, but knew their grandparents.

32

I was born and raised in ND, Bismarck in particular; and am now an ex-pat, so I finally feel qualified to answer a question on here.

What’s been mentioned above is correct, in terms of farming communities. The smaller ones are being bought out and the economies are drying up in those older towns. The ‘ghost towns’ are the ones that most people see and truly haven’t been inhabited for quite awhile.

I can only remember a handful of places that were really abandoned in my lifetime, 30 for the record, and it’s usually a slow decline.

Most of the towns lose the young people and the old ones just die off. The lack of jobs outside of farming in most of those places leads to the outmigration problem we have there. There are many communities of 100-200 or less than that. Most communities are an hour or two drive from the urban spots (Fargo, Grand Forks, Dickinson, Bismarck, etc.), so they can last for awhile. It’s not as ‘middle of nowhere’ as it used to be.

The railroads were set up on intervals of 30-50 miles, according to my grandpa who was a telegraph operator from 1949-1970. He moved around quite a bit to different depots. They’d bid on a location and take the contract for whatever the length was; he and my grandma and dad lived in the depot in town and that was that.

As for the land purchase plans mentioned, here’s a link to one couple that did it: http://www.bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/article_cc28bcda-1a87-11df-8d88-001cc4c03286.html

This is the same town where my dad is from and my grandpa still lives; I basically grew up there as well. Tiny population, everyone knows everyone else, etc. A new business will open once in a while, but just fall apart in a year or so. The difficult part is keeping people there and finding those who want to put up with a 45 minute commute (one way) to work there.

I would say the biggest problem though about new people coming up and living is the insular lifestyle and total distrust people have of anyone outside the midwest.

It’s not that they’re bad people or racist, I think it stems from the isolation so many of the older folks have grown up with and just a sense of sameness between everyone.

33

Wow…I used to deliver soda to Bucyrus and Amidon when I was a college kid. Amidon was always small but Bucyrus seemed like it was doing ok.

Bowman was a neat small town that I thought would die out but I hear is actually doing pretty well from someone I know that lives near there.

They die out because the kids leave (I am one of them). There really isn’t many career opportunities for young people in many parts of ND especially if you run on the nerdy side.

34

Yea…ND is actually a pretty upkept state in my biased opinion :). It’s never really experienced a boom from which it crashed.

However…driving through parts of Western Texas?? Wow…THERE is some decline!

35

We have abandoned coal towns here in PA. The town where my paternal grandfather was born no longer exists, save as a few barely visible overgrown foundations. Ditto the town where my mother was born. The town where I was born had close to 7,000 people when I was a kid. Last I heard, they are down to about half that.

Interesting site, but it doesn’t list my grandfather’s or mother’s birthplace. I should contact them with details.

36

The death of the small town in the Canadian prairies probably correlates well with the N. Dakota situation.

It started a LONG time ago.

  1. WW1 depopulated the towns young men who fought and died in Europe, this in itself was enough to “kill” small towns in Saskatewan. Many who did return had experienced a wider, ,ore exciting life than small towns / farming could offer and moved away.

  2. Hot on the heels of WW1 was the Influenza epidemic, which helped to depopulate the remaining civillians.

3)The growth of highways, and the transportation technology made a lot of the towns redundant, literally.

4)The great depresion drove many people into larger centers, seeking what few jobs were available.

  1. WW2 - once again, the young men went away, often not to return.

Throw in some bad winters and droughts, and generally falling farm profits, and the prairie small town was pretty effectively doomed, unless it had some Tourist, or other industry - mining, forrestry, pupl and paper, etc. or something similar.