Ephemeral Towns and Civilizations on the Prairie

I spent a few wonderful afternoons at the North Dakota Sate Archives sifting through old newspapers last week. The scanned print to the left comes from a microfilmed 1905 issue of the Mayville Tribune in Mayville, North Dakota.

I am trying to trace the history of a town that grew, had it's heyday, and died before I was even born. My youth was filled with adventures of sneaking into old abandoned buildings of a town that once was. Have you ever caught frogs in the flooded basement of an old church? I grew up on the crumbling bedrock of a civilization that had once prospered.

The eminent North Dakota historian Elywyn Robinson has written about what he calls the "too much mistake" in the development of North Dakota. The idea land and available resources and location would never support the population that lived on these prairies in the early 20th century. After a peak in the teens or early 1920's (coninciding with imigration to the state) the population of the town has declined ever since. What we are left with are the hollow remnants of a great hope filled idea that once was. I want to grasp the zeitgeist of this heady era and populate it with my ancestors.
Clifford barely exists today, except in the all too ubiquitous fashion of a bar, a grain elevator and a few homes. "Don't blink or you'll miss it" is a good description of this place.
I will continue searching for the town that once was and the hope filled people that once populated it, in the belief that the past will help illuminate the present and the future.