The Remnants Of This Partially Abandoned Town In North Dakota Are Hauntingly Fascinating
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Found this interesting? Read about one of North Dakota’s most notorious abandoned places – except it’s a lot creepier!
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