Photograph by Eugene Richards

Epping, N.D.

Dan Stomley, 55, grew up nearby, but he knows nothing of the house sitting lonely on a knoll. A local woman in her 90s would have known. But about a year ago her mind started fading. Stomley wanted to buy the place 30 years ago, but he’s not sore the owners wouldn’t sell. “Might have been their family place,” he says. Stomley’s grandfather’s house farther north is tumbling also, on 240 acres (97 hectares) he worked with horses. He had 20 cows and took the cream into Crosby, North Dakota, once a week.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Gascoyne, N.D.

The last high school class in Gascoyne, North Dakota, graduated in 1940. When Vernon Peterson entered the elementary grades, he formed one-half of a class of two. Now the land almost swallows up the sagging old schoolhouse, its shingles peeling off the roof. The town, founded in 1907, is down to 13 souls. In the early 1960s, local kids started taking classes in nearby Scranton. Peterson and his wife, Marlene, raised four sons, but they have gone off to find livings. He stands outside under the endless sky and says, “That was the grocery and post office, that was the hardware store, there was the ice-cream parlor. Now the football team is gone from the school in Scranton. We may lose basketball. We graduated 15 last year, but we only have seven in kindergarten.” A torn page from a textbook flutters in the breeze from a broken window in the Gascoyne school. The lesson reads: “Write the Other Word for CRY, AFTER, BAD, ALWAYS, GOOD-BY, LOST, and DARK.”

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Mott, N.D.

The floors of this house are strewn with the detritus of lives let go, ankle-deep with abandoned possessions. Except in this room, left orderly and arranged with care like a museum of a vanished loved one. The red hat is part of the uniform for the town’s marching band.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Belfield, N.D.

On the highways that dissect North Dakota, horizon always beckons.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Charbonneau, N.D.

Cars are left behind when they can no longer help you leave. A grain elevator waits by the bottomland, the farmers long gone. The nearby house that Elsie Carsten’s father built has caved into the cellar. “It doesn’t make me sad to see it all going back to the earth. That’s the way life is,” she says.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Walum, N.D.

As walls tumble, boundaries fray and the line between house and barnyard melts away. The horses living near this white house south of Walum appear neglected, lonely on the plain.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Mott, N.D.

“That place has been empty for years,” says Gilmer Anderson, 87, who farms a few miles to the north. He stops his tractor and says, “Rufus Svihovec, Bohemian, you know. He was an awful heavy drinker, married once, the wife died. He went to the old-folks home in Mott, and he died there.” And then Anderson fires up his tractor and gets back to spreading hay for his cows. Rufus had one foot mangled in a mower as a child and so lived his life disabled. To Ervin Schneider, he was Uncle Rufus, a hired hand who worked his father’s farm when he was a boy. Schneider would wear new shoes for Rufus, to soften them for his foot. Once, just before Schneider went to high school, Uncle Rufus shared some wine with him, and the next thing Schneider remembered were the cows stepping over him as they entered the barn for milking. “Look at this,” says Schneider, and he picks up an old photograph from the 1950s, Rufus leaning over the wheel of his car with a grin, his wife, Anna, in the passenger seat. “When I was ten,” he says, “I saw Uncle Rufus lift the engine from a Model A with his bare hands. Rufus and Anna had a tough life. Everyone did then.”

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Hanks, N.D.

Debra Quarne is 53, has 56 horses, and is the last resident of Hanks. Once there were 200. Down the road from her home is a failed bank—a man hanged himself in the basement there during the dust and ruin of the 1930s. “I love it here,” she says. “It’s my own little corner of the world.”

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Grenora, N.D.

“I’m the oldest man in town,” says Ragnar Slaaen, 96. “That house used to belong to some people from Montana, been empty at least 50 years. They farmed a little bit. What happened to them? I suppose they got old and croaked. I was born in 1911, twelve miles (20 kilometers) north of town on a homestead. My father came from Norway. He died when I was two. I can’t imagine where my mother found the food. I went eight grades to a country school. Nobody went to high school—we had to work. I worked for a neighbor at age eight picking up rocks all day. I got my own farm in ’36. I plowed with horses. We didn’t have any rain at all. With the dusters, it was so dark you couldn’t see anything inside the house. Everything just blew away. You had to get used to breathing dirt. Our first baby was a girl, stillborn. Do you know what stillborn means? We had two boys. I’ve had a good life, a lovely wife. She died seven years ago. I’ve still got my hair. You know I sit here alone for six months at a time, nobody comes to see me. I’ve outlived them all. I’m the oldest man in town.”

Photograph by Eugene Richards

Powers Lake, N.D.

The dust clouds one blue eye as the severed doll’s head stares up in the garage. Nearby is a walker for an infant, a red plastic telephone, and two more dolls, one with limbs severed. There is a small newspaper clipping noting the birth of Jolene Melissa, the first child, on October 6, 1982. Also, the sale of a Holstein for $250 in 1974. They are fragments of dreams in a garage near a small white frame house with a neighboring red barn in the sweep of the plains. Plus, a small rubber Santa Claus waiting for Christmas. Many abandoned houses have dolls with blond hair and blue eyes.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

A bridal train flows from a plastic bag hanging on the door of a second-floor bedroom of the white frame house. The fabric is synthetic. The house is empty, the door secured by a wire, the floors beginning to sag from loneliness. The marriage took place October 29, 1994. A plastic box holds champagne glasses, a garter belt, a spare veil, the top of the cake decoration, the serving utensils for cutting and sharing the cake.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

The light green paint is cracked in the living room; the harvest prayer on a crucifix rests on a shelf. Matt and Josephine Demianew built the three-room house just north of Belfield. Matt farmed the land and also worked on the railroad. Josephine couldn’t drive, so, after Matt died, she had to move to town.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

This dying town follows the arc of Melvin Wisdahl’s life. He is past 80 and remembers what most want to forget. There were a lot of kids when he was young and not much money and no roads. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was big in the area. Nearby Wildrose had 300 people and a hundred came for a Klan rally. There were hardly any blacks, so the Klan focused on Catholics. A man rode in on horseback, murdered a family in the area, and was lynched. The town shrank and tumbled in on itself. Melvin and his wife, Morrene, made some good crops, raised two boys, and loved farming. He remembers when it had about 75 people. The town is down to three families.

Photograph by Eugene Richards

An old coffeepot sits in the kitchen of the Bethel Lutheran Church, which went up around 1912 and for years was a gathering place for its congregation of 25 or 30. As the congregation dwindled, it joined with one in nearby Wildrose. But it was hard. “For a few years, we had church just in summer,” says Dennis Jacobson, 58. “It was a way to close it down but not too suddenly. Then for a few years, once a summer. There was a group of people, and my father was one, who decided he wanted to keep it up rather than let it go to ruin.” Recently they spent eight or nine thousand dollars repairing the steeple. But Jacobson advises, “this will probably be the last time there will be money spent.”