A Map of Prairie Ghosts

 

 

Location of Broadlawn school in Steele County. 1892 Traill and Steele County Atlas. Courtesy Library of Congress

Recently, I was searching for the location of a school in Broadlawn Township, Steele County, North Dakota. The school had been started in the late 1880s by A.C. Hughes, the first person to live on and break the prairie sod on the land I grew up on.  His daughter, Katie, who grew up on the farm even taught at the school for a short time. Through conversations, I discovered that it was probably sited on the corner of the next section over from where Hughes lived.  

I have driven by that field corner for half a century and had no idea that there had once been a school there. Attempting to verify, I looked at a 1959 aerial map on the ND Aerial Photography Mapservice website. By the time the photos were taken, the school was already gone. On the northern plains, there are so many former farmsites, parts of towns, schools and churches that are now little more than farm fields, that discerning what was there before can be hard. 

Old maps often only give a general location and aerial photography for many areas doesn't exist until the mid to late 20th century, when many buildings were already gone. If I were just to try and log the places that have been plowed under in my lifetime, just in the several townships I am most familiar with, it would be an undertaking to pinpoint their exact locations from memory and aerial imagery. As for sites that disappeared before my lifetime, it becomes progressively harder as one goes back in time. 

With modern GIS or something as simple as Google Maps, one could drop a pin on each of the locations and link in photos, historical data and other media. Most interesting would be the "birth and death" dates of these various structures. Putting it all on a map would create interesting datasets that could be used to statistically measure the populating and depopulating of the built environment.