The Remnants Of This Partially Abandoned Town In North Dakota Are Hauntingly Fascinating
By Leah|Published November 30, 2016
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Leah
Author
Leah moved to North Dakota when she was 12 years old and has traveled from the Red River Valley to the badlands and many places in between. She loves small-town life and currently enjoys living on a small farm in the ND prairie. She's always had a passion for writing and has participated in novel writing challenges such as NaNoWriMo multiple times. Her favorite part about this job is recognizing small businesses that deserve a boost and seeing the positive affect her articles can have on their traffic, especially in rural areas that might have otherwise gone overlooked.
We recently featured a town that wasn’t quite a ghost town, but wasn’t quite a lively city anymore either, on a list of cool places in North Dakota. It is known as Marmarth, and it is something that is unique and a mixture of beautiful and creepy. While a few parts of the town are still alive and well today (like its amazing steakhouse), a lot of the town’s buildings stand empty and deteriorating. There is just something fascinating about seeing a town in a mixture of both abandoned and alive. See for yourself:
Slope County is the least populated county in all of North Dakota, at only 727 residents among its two towns and two unincorporated communities. The only other town is Amidon. It sits right by the Montana border.
Though from a glance a the town can look completely abandoned, around 140 people still live there.
There are still plenty of occupied houses and surrounding farms in Marmarth, but the main street buildings are what show the emptiness that can still be found there.
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There are many spots in the town that seem to allude to a time since passed, a time when the town was something more.
When it was founded, over 5,000 people were here. In the 1920s, Marmarth was still home to over 1,300 people. The remnants of this era in its life can be found hidden among the buildings. To walk through and explore parts of Marmarth is like walking through a time capsule and imagining what it was like back then.
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Marmarth has seen many faces in its time, including a notable few.
Theodore Roosevelt, known for his love of this state other than being a former president and being one of the four depicted on Mount Rushmore, spent quite a bit of time at this town and often noted it elsewhere. The ranch house he would stay at here is still standing today. Another person of fame was here, too - Sitting Bull. He was wounded near Marmarth but saved by his nephew White Bull.
Many old buildings from the early 1900s are still standing strong in Marmarth, even if many empty. The barber auditorium, for example, is shown above, is beautiful and very old. The Mystic Theater in the town is over a century old and is on the register as a historic place.
Marmarth was once referred to as "the city of trees."
At one point it was one of the few forested places of the badlands, located on the edge of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Another notable natural finding here is the Dakota Dinosaur, a dinosaur fossil with a unique attribute: not only were the bones fossilized, but skin and soft tissues, too. The fossil is estimated to be about 67 million years old. Other fossils have been uncovered here and still are today.
A lot of the structures stand empty, deteriorating slowly as nature takes its toll.
Though decaying, the town stands as a fascinating and haunting part of history, one that lives on through both the structures and the stories of the people living there and those of the past.
