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 Will the Last Person to Leave North Dakota Please Turn Off the Lights? Picking up where I left off in my last update (see News: September 15, 2001), I arrived in Bismarck on the sunny, hot Saturday of Labor Day weekend. My mother, who passed away a few years ago, was born here in the 1920s and left Bismarck after marrying my dad in 1943. I came to Bismarck to find out what I could about my mom and her ancestors and have been here for about a month, mostly updating my website and doing family research in the Bismarck Public Library while staying at nearby Fort Lincoln State Park. As I mentioned, I also spent a week getting my truck's transmission fixed.
North Dakota, with a population of only 640,000 (one-third the size of Portland) is one of the least populated states in the U.S. and is the only state that has consistently lost population during the past several decades. The net out-migration is partly due to the brutal winters here. Though the summers in North Dakota are generally pleasant, winters here are pretty nasty with an average high temperature of 20 degrees in Bismarck during January and an average low of 2 below zero.
Yep, kids here learn pretty fast not to stick their tongue on the flagpole in the wintertime. But according to a local paper I read recently from 1917, winters here really aren't that bad because it's "a humid cold and not a dry cold." Yeah, right – as if that makes a difference! As everyone says, "It's not the cold, it's the humidity."
The other reason people are leaving North Dakota is that, as farming becomes more mechanized, fewer people are needed to grow the crops here. After graduating from high school, most rural North Dakotans either move to the cities here, like Bismarck, or they leave the state altogether. The large cities in this state ("large" being a relative term with the largest city, Fargo, having just 80,000 people) are growing slowly, but the population of rural areas and small towns here are, for the most part, dropping fast. In fact, many rural towns in North Dakota over the past 30 years have disappeared and blown away with the wind.
In just about every other part of the U.S., the concept of "growth" is a given: most cities are getting bigger, most roads are getting more congested, etc. It's a very strange feeling to know that a lot of people in North Dakota are looking to move OUT, and not many people outside of the state want to move in. Judging from the large number of older folks here and the small number of younger folks, the declining population trend will probably continue for many more years. On the positive side, though, housing here is really cheap.
Above left: My mom lived in this house in Bismarck when she was a teenager. She met my dad during the summer of 1943 a few weeks after she graduated from high school. He was going to Naval Officer's Training School in Dickinson, 90 miles west of here and they met at a dance. Above right: Here's Bismarck High School. It looks pretty much the same now as when my mom went here in the early 1940s.
Above left: Getting Jiffy Lubed in Bismarck, North Dakota. Above center: Gee, I wish I lived here. Above right: Being a volleyball fan, I drove out to Bismarck State College one evening and watched my first volleyball match in four months. It wasn't great volleyball, but at least it was volleyball.
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