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The Emptied Prairie

North Dakota ghost towns speak of an irreversible decline.

/galleries/bcove/assets/9a30da1c-b310-49b1-9f21-d16d8a4a53ab.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/ae576d75-4c7c-451b-b1d4-3a8280a10c26.jpg 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. ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/c17a0ef1-9e99-4777-85ba-9ef12eae0866.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/06f6751e-fe06-4ce2-ad9b-fdaf81692307.jpg 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.” ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/62e0f08b-d9d2-41ce-ab97-9b02c58b5adc.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/d2b3f8e4-1d38-4506-97af-04e34d685dab.jpg 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. ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/0f013f8b-a817-4e07-8fe0-e8853168f8d9.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/bd645bd7-2f3c-4b73-a24c-35919837462b.jpg Belfield, N.D. On the highways that dissect North Dakota, horizon always beckons. ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/891b63f7-f45e-4a18-9d81-d43cff12dae7.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/970b63f5-2de6-414d-9717-18f65855479f.jpg 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. ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/f7fe13f6-0732-4dc9-96fc-dd932f9d1680.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/e0d66863-15b6-4b95-be6a-9f720bfb4595.jpg 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. ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/e455e88e-184a-45f0-8922-64e48659d4a0.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/aba0a6dc-130d-4e1c-b346-ca815a290640.jpg 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.”]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/6520e76f-5ec7-4081-9036-be116bddeb0f.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/ba184658-f09a-43e2-9f66-83584503c647.jpg 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.” ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/a1cf94e8-629b-4988-8b80-85cdb67e6bd1.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/80e128a6-bac9-486d-971d-a8a3151602d8.jpg 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.” ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/15d9b77a-0c5b-474d-b71e-dc6ad618c43b.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/16f55ba4-2a75-47e0-a1f5-d7367c9e4a24.jpg 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. ]]> /galleries/bcove/assets/c09d4139-1a0f-4a24-a60a-ed5aa453a301.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/b3f1d27e-ef38-4db6-978a-7fff2f6f2e56.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/8aa75950-2e39-49c2-b3b0-b0a9bff12b7b.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/07bf3614-df0c-40c9-8103-e4fd3b5631f3.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/491c29f9-d903-4c5c-805d-4257baadd7ae.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/acaf759d-1ec0-4a4a-9edf-75240a0d154c.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/7dc3e06d-5fb8-4606-8c84-c7fa66f40652.jpg /galleries/bcove/assets/9abde5b9-81f7-4c05-8216-b6c00e5805c6.jpg