~The Great Plains Examiner will now feature a “Ghost Town of the Month” in each print issue and online. Please visit their website at GhostsOfND.com and support their efforts to document North Dakota’s history.~
As we approached Nanson, we were struck by the wide open space and the brilliant blue sky. The green rolling hills brought to mind the opening sequence of ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ On the road to Nanson, trees were sparse and we saw farmsteads less frequently than you normally would on a drive through rural North Dakota. Traffic diminished and the solitude pressed in. And just when we thought we had driven through a time portal to the 1800′s, a wind farm appeared over the horizon and dozens of turbines with giant white blades spun lazily in the prairie wind.
Nearly ten years ago, I had set out with a co-worker, Terry Hinnenkamp, to explore a few ghost towns in northeastern North Dakota — Blabon and Sherbrooke in Steele county. We discovered Blabon was a near-ghost town with a handful of residents, and Sherbrooke was a true ghost town, having been abandoned in the 1980s. With the woman who would become my wife, Rebecca, we spent most of the day photographing what we saw, and wondering aloud about the town of Sherbrooke and what had become of its residents.
That sense of wonder turned into a passion for ghost towns and abandoned places, and we began to photograph them every free chance we got. We started a website at GhostsofNorthDakota.com and began to share our photos online. We hoped that some of the places we were photographing could be saved through historic preservation, but we were confronted by a discouraging reality. In North Dakota’s vanishing pioneer towns, there aren’t many people or resources to preserve what’s left, and without local support, many of the remaining structures were doomed to consumption by fire, or obliteration by the harsh prairie seasons. We soon developed a desire to document the remains of North Dakota’s abandoned places, before they were gone forever.
We spent our summers driving and shooting every abandoned place we could find, and in summer of 2012, we set out to explore Nanson.
We arrived at our turn — from a paved two lane highway to a hard-packed, chalky dirt road. We were only able to drive a few hundred feet before we were forced to get out and walk due to deep potholes with puddles at the bottom. We had arrived at Nanson.
Today, only four homes and a few scattered buildings remain of the town that was once Nanson. It is a true ghost town, population zero. Incredibly, there was not a powerline or telephone pole to be seen. The only sign that people once inhabited this place were the crumbling remains of family homes, all arranged in a line on the west side of the road.
Visitors to our website have commented on a store which operated in Nanson until the 1970′s… that store is no longer in Nanson. It has been moved to the Hawk Antique and Farm Machinery Museum near Wolford.
We got covered in wood ticks during that trip to Nanson, but we had plenty of time to pick them off ourselves during our hours-long drive back to Fargo. And it was a small price to pay for the privilege of photographing a vanishing North Dakota town, perhaps for the last time.
~Troy Larson is a radio industry professional from Fargo, and co-founder of GhostsOfNorthDakota.com. His first book, Ghosts of North Dakota: North Dakota’s Ghost Towns and Abandoned Places, is available now exclusively at GhostsofNorthDakota.com~
[...] Some North Dakota abandonment porn. [...]