• Argusville High School

    Argusville: School’s Out

    We paid a brief visit to Argusville High School today and found things have changed quite a bit since our last visit in 2011.  The school was in a terrible state of disrepair and had been thoroughly vandalized when we last saw it, but it has since been secured and made safe. The rusting twin [...]

  • Straubville, North Dakota

    Straubville, North Dakota: A True Ghost Town

    We visited Straubville, North Dakota 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 [...]

  • Heaton

    Abandoned Structures: The Stages of Ruin

    In our ten years of exploring North Dakota’s ghost towns and abandoned places, we’ve seen structures in all stages of condition.  Many places meet an unnatural end due to fire, flood, and the bulldozer.  If a building can survive without suffering an unfortunate fate however, it goes through a somewhat predictable process.  We’ve learned a [...]

  • Fargo Fire 1893

    The Great Fargo Fire of 1893

    June 7th, 1893 was a typical Wednesday in Fargo, sunny but windy.  Fargo’s six thousand residents were going about their lives, carrying out their business from mostly wooden storefronts and traveling from place to place in horse drawn carriages and wagons. Winds were gusting to 30 miles per hour that day.  Even today, if you’ve [...]

  • Video: Memorial Weekend Trip 2013

    After getting suggestions from several people that we start doing videos again, we decided to ease back into it and we did just a little bit of video on our trip over Memorial Weekend.  We stopped doing videos some years ago, mainly because there are only two of us, and when we go on a [...]

  • Crystal Springs, ND

    Return to Crystal Springs

    We first visited Crystal Springs in 2005, primarily to photograph the abandoned school which is quite visible from the Interstate.  We didn’t find out until later that we had neglected to photograph a portion of Crystal Springs which sits just north of the highway.  So, on Memorial Weekend of 2013, we returned to Crystal Springs. [...]

  • Sanger, ND

    Sanger: No Longer a Ghost Town

    Nine years after our first visit to Sanger, North Dakota, we returned to see how things had changed.  Imagine our surprise when we discovered Sanger is no longer a true ghost town.  There had been no population when we visited in 2004, but today, Sanger is inhabited by two men, Ron and Dan, who moved [...]

  • Sterling School 2

    Sterling School No. 2

    We’ve seen this school referenced online as Wing School #3, however the sign above the door appears to read Sterling No. 2.  The school is located closer to Wing than it is Sterling, so we wonder whether this school originally stood somewhere else and was moved to this spot, about 9 miles north of Wing. [...]

  • Arena, ND

    Arena: Nine Years Later

    We first visited Arena in May of 2004.  Nine years later, we returned to this rolling spot on the prairie in Burleigh County and found things much the same, if somewhat weathered. St. John’s Lutheran church still stands, though the white paint has weathered considerably over the last nine years.  The cinderblock foundation on the [...]

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Stardust 17 Drive-In

Walsh County Vacant since ’91 In the course of his travels, Rat stumbled upon the Stardust 17 Drive-In on the west side of Grafton.  The Stardust held 300 cars and hosted movie showings for decades. According to one online account, the Stardust 17′s screen blew down in a windstorm in October of 1991.  There were some [...]

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Nekoma Safeguard Complex

Cavalier County The Nekoma Safeguard Complex is a unique place in the history of the US military’s anti-ballistic missile effort.  A portion of the Wikipedia entry for this place:   the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard complex in Nekoma, North Dakota, with the separate long-range detection radar located further north near the town of Cavalier, North Dakota, [...]

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Trip Report, August 14th, 2011

Trip Report August 14th, 2011 We started our day by stopping in Ardoch to photograph an elevator that Rat’s been checkin’ out for awhile.  All the excitement hit us at once… two little yapper dogs came running out into the road and ran in circles around the car.  It was all Rat could do not [...]

Bartlett

And my phone is dead.

A close call in Nekoma.

We had a run in with an angry property owner in Nekoma.

Fordville

Got some cool photos in Fordville including an old theater.  This is Main street.

Conway stop

Conway was awesome. We got tons of photos… Lots of abandoned places.

Stardust 17

The  Stardust 17 in Grafton.  Lots more photos of this to come…

A quick stop in Ardoch

We just stopped in Ardoch to get a few pics… Including this grain elevator.

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Nekoma, ND

Cavalier County Nekoma’s population was 50 in the 2010 Census, slightly more populous than most of the towns we photograph.  At the same time, there were a few cool abandoned structures and/or throwback reminders to simpler days… like the little orange gas pumps.  Since we were in the area to photograph the Safeguard Missile Complex, [...]