In 2003 we started photographing North Dakota ghost towns and abandoned places, first as a hobby and then, as a fascinating learning exercise. We learned about the Homestead Act that had settlers moving to the upper Midwest en masse, the railroads that built towns every eight miles along the tracks so the locomotives could refill their steam engines, and the population and development boom that sometimes followed.
We also learned that as fortunes rose with the coming of the railroad, they also fell when the railroad failed to arrive. Several of the first true ghost towns we ever visited — Sherbrooke, North Dakota, where a President once spent the night, and Lincoln Valley, North Dakota, once an entire town of homes, stores and streets — were vivid examples of towns that initially boomed, and then vanished.
We took photos of everything we saw, pretty much. Homes, churches, and stores. Bridges, lost highways, asylums and abandoned military installations. If it was within the borders of North Dakota, we likely visited it, with very few exceptions. From 2003 to 2015, we drove a little under 100,000 miles and had an absolute blast doing it. It brought us so much joy and we will always be grateful for it.
When we started doing this, there weren’t a lot of people doing it (the late Andrew Filer was one of them, may he rest in peace) but it seems in the last 20 years the beauty of the austere and abandoned has enjoyed a renaissance. Photos of ghost towns and abandoned places are everywhere; in every app and on every social media site, and we take a little pride in knowing we were there in the beginning.
As Terry and I have transitioned to different stages of life (and now live across the state from each other) we’ve been proud to say we were the “Ghosts of North Dakota guys” and talk to people we meet about the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen, and we always will be. However, the active part of our explorations and research has unfortunately come to an end as we indulge different careers and pursuits.
So, you guys are done?
I am sure there will still be an occasion when we find ourselves in the car, on the road, in the middle of nowhere, and there will be some new photos showing up on Ghosts of North Dakota when we get home. That will surely happen, but we have largely retired from the chase.
The problem is… what about these photos?
When we started Ghosts of North Dakota, our mission was to photographically document these places before they’re gone forever. Inherent in the mission was a sense of virtual preservation. If there aren’t any residents left to fix a place up, all you can do is remember the place when it’s gone.
Eventually, we did a couple of books and you were kind enough to buy a few of them (there are still some copies of two of them left) and it felt good to get some of these photos out in a medium that wasn’t electronic.
To me, however, preservation means forever, and these photos, the tangible memories of these lost places, aren’t going to live forever on our hard drives. As a result, we have decided to release the entire Ghosts of North Dakota photo library into the public domain.
One-by-one, I will be posting the galleries of individual places on our Facebook page. Whenever possible I will include the exact date the photos were taken. You’ll be able to save them straight from the Facebook page, or follow a link in the comments to download the original, full-resolution, unprocessed photos. In some of the later years, our RAW-format originals will also be included.
All the photos will be released under a free-use license, sometimes referred to as a Creative Commons 0 (Zero) license. That means you can use them however you wish, for private or commercial use, and you can choose whether to credit us when you use them. (We always appreciate a credit, of course, but it’ll be up to you.)
It’s our gift to you, and a way of saying thank you for all your support over the years. We get occasional emails from people who want permission to use one of our photos for a special event, or to base a painting on one of them. We almost always said yes, and hopefully, we’ll see more of that in the future. You will be free to print them out, use them as inspiration for your own works, or however else you see fit.
Watch for the first public domain release coming to our Facebook page very soon.