Historic Markers in North Dakota

McHenry County, ND

David Thompson, born in 1770, was one of the greatest land geographers of his age, a fur trader who mapped vast stretches of the northern interior with astonishing accuracy. In 1797 and 1798 he passed through this region on a scientific and trading expedition, taking the astronomical observations that let him chart the country that would become North Dakota. Working for the fur companies of British North America, he ultimately surveyed and mapped nearly two million square miles of terrain.

Enderlin, ND

This community monument gathers the sacrifice of Enderlin-area service members under a familiar epitaph of American remembrance — that all who served gave something, and some gave everything. Small prairie towns across North Dakota raised such memorials to keep the names and losses of their sons and daughters before the community, spanning the wars of the twentieth century and beyond.

Beach, ND

The Occidental Elevators were the first grain elevators built in Beach, North Dakota, a railroad town on the state's western edge founded in the early twentieth-century homestead boom. Towering elevators like these were the economic heart of prairie towns, gathering wheat from surrounding homesteads for shipment east by rail. Being the first, they mark the moment Beach became a shipping point on the Northern Plains.

Pembina County, ND

Bowesmont was founded on the Red River in 1879 and moved in 1886 to sit beside the railroad, growing into a thriving community graced by a handsome neoclassical Community Hall. Today the town has all but vanished, and this memorial marks where it once stood.