Ghosts on the Prairie-Abandoned North Dakota

I really like North Dakota.  It gets a bad rap a being cold, windy, treeless and barely habitable.  While it may be true that it does indeed get cold, and can be very windy, it can also be absolutely beautiful looking out over endless fields, dramatic badlands and a horizon that stretches out straight as an arrow before you.  I have had the opportunity to visit North Dakota numerous times over the last few years, and each trip out, I make an effort to document some of the old farms, schools, churches and even towns, that still stand as a testament to an era that is slipping away.  Farms that were 160 acres weren’t enough to support a family, so many were sold off, or the immigrants from Germany or Norway or Iceland or the Ukraine found that land promised in the flyers in Europe did not accurately describe what they would find here.  The pictures I post are those that I have taken during trips down the gravel roads, I wish I knew the stories behind each one.  It would be interesting to know why an abandoned church looks like people had just walked out and left without taking the piano or the organ with them.  Okay, on with the posting.  This abandoned farmhouse had a really cool windmill nearby and was close to the town of Appam.  This is one of my favorite North Dakota images, it was a beautiful cloudless morning and field of wheat or barley I was standing in was not yet ripe.  This photo was published in the Year End Travel Section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2009.  I shot it from a very low angle to emphasize the grain in the foreground.