Defining what exactly constitutes a “ghost town” can sometimes be tricky. In our years of exploring North Dakota’s abandoned places, we’ve often encountered former towns where the townsite itself is empty, but there’s a farm about half a mile down the road. Sometimes a former town like Sims, North Dakota has an active church, but nobody actually lives on the town site. And still other times, we will hear objections from people who feel as though we’ve misrepresented their town, or somehow labeled it a ghost town because it appears on this website, in which case we clarify that this site is about ghost towns and abandoned places, like the former First National Bank and Barber Auditorium in Marmarth, North Dakota, a town with a population numbering more than a hundred.
Continue reading “20 True Ghost Towns: Population Zero”Category Straubville, ND
Ten More Lost North Dakota Places
Sometimes we photograph a place and find out years later that it’s gone, sometimes the place is gone by the time we get there. But the one constant is that the list of places is growing all the time.
Here’s another list of ten more significant North Dakota places that have unfortunately lost their battle with time. When you’re done with this one, check out 10 Lost North Dakota Places, and 8 More Lost North Dakota Places.
Continue reading “Ten More Lost North Dakota Places”We visited Straubville, North Dakota, a ghost town south of Jamestown, on a cloudy day in 2005 and found it totally abandoned. Unfortunately, we arrived a few years too late to capture the major remaining buildings when they were still standing. We’ve been told that things have deteriorated since our last visit, so we’re hoping to go back to Straubville some time in the near future for an update.
We were recently digging through our archive and realized we had a good selection of photos from Straubville that we had never posted, so here they are for your enjoyment. Continue reading “Straubville, North Dakota: A True Ghost Town”
Straubville, North Dakota: A True Ghost Town
The Ghost Town Known as Straubville, North Dakota
About 60 miles southwest of Wahpeton, in Sargent County, stands the ghost town known as Straubville, North Dakota. It was named for the first settler, Joseph W. Straub, who donated ten acres for the town site, in 1883. A Great Northern Railroad station was founded in 1886, and population peaked at 40.
This was a place we visited early in our Ghosts of North Dakota adventures, in 2005, and it was one of the first places we encountered where it seemed obvious that if we had arrived ten or fifteen years earlier, there would have been much more to photograph. Continue reading “The Ghost Town Known as Straubville, North Dakota”
Ghosts of North Dakota 