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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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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 [...]
Kathryn, ND
Kathryn is a beautiful little town in Barnes county, nestled in the Sheyenne River Valley. It is more of a small town than a near-ghost town with a population of 57. There’s a nice little bar in Kathryn, and one or two more businesses as well as some nicely maintained homes. We decided to photograph [...]
Sheyenne River Academy
Wells County Abandoned in 1977 Sheyenne River Academy opened its doors on this site north of Harvey in 1904 and was in operation until the end of the 1976 school year. It was a Seventh Day Adventist secondary school. The new location known as Dakota Adventist Academy opened in 1977 near Bismarck. The present owner [...]
All That Remains of Deisem
Since starting this website about North Dakota’s ghost towns and abandoned places nearly ten years ago, suggestions about places to visit have been rolling in. One of the suggestions we’ve received on more than one occasion is a place called Deisem, North Dakota. So in July of 2012, with my business partner and fellow photographer [...]
King School
This is the former King School, just a few miles south of Valley City along the Sheyenne River Valley Scenic Byway. This building was erected in 1930, but it was preceded by another structure, also known as the King School, which was erected in the 1880′s on a different site. The plaque pictured below reads, [...]
Forgotten Farmstead
This forgotten farmstead is nestled in the hills of the Sheyenne River Valley along the Scenic Byway, south of Valley City, near Kathryn. If you’re ever in the area, you should definitely take the opportunity to enjoy this beautiful drive. This abandoned home was fenced and quite distant from the road, with no obvious vehicular [...]
Dresden, North Dakota
Dresden is a small town in Cavalier County, home to the Cavalier County Museum at Dresden, about six miles northwest of Langdon. The museum is housed in the former Holy Trinity Church, an incredible field-stone structure erected in 1936. Dresden is home to numerous historic structures in varying states of restoration, including the Dyer School [...]
Maza School
This former schoolhouse is virtually all that remains of a town that was once Maza in southern Towner county, a short drive south of Cando. In 2000, the population of Maza was listed as 5. In 2002, the city was dissolved. Today, there are some scattered buildings in the area and a farm or two. [...]
Standing Rock Hill Historic Site
Barnes County This is the Standing Rock Hill Historic Site, south of Kathryn and west of Enderlin, just up the hill from Little Yellowstone Park, right off Highway 46. It is also just a short drive from Jensen Cabin at Wadeson Park. Standing Rock Hill Historic Site consists of four Native American burial mounds, the largest of which [...]
Jensen Cabin at Wadeson Park
Barnes County This cabin was built in 1878 by Norwegian immigrant Carl Bjerke Jensen, made from hand-hewn oak. The cabin and the land were donated to the State Historical Society by the Wadeson family in 1957. This cabin was in pretty bad shape until it was restored in 1981. I stumbled upon this place while taking a drive [...]
Dakota Thunder and Frontier Village
Frontier Village is a tourist attraction just off Interstate 94 in Jamestown and includes the World’s Largest Buffalo, a concrete buffalo statue named Dakota Thunder, Frontier Village, a re-creation of a pioneer town featuring actual historic buildings which have been moved to the site from all over the state, and the National Buffalo Museum. There [...]
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