The Stearns family’s grain elevator near Griffin, N.D., is the ghost town’s last original building still standing on its original foundation. Photo credit: Bruce Selyem.
On the north side of Highway 12 through Bowman County, North Dakota, between Bowman and Rhame, there is a lone metal-sided crib grain elevator next to the railroad tracks. It has been standing there since it was built between 1917 and 1923 — more than 100 years, longer than any passerby remembers. The elevator is on the south side of the tracks, and what remains of Griffin, N.D., is on the north side.
Prior to February 1908, the town was called Atkinson. The Chicago, Milwaukee and Puget Sound, a subsidiary of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad (CMStP&P), commonly called the Milwaukee Road, arrived in 1907. The following year, the town name was changed to Griffin to honor Henry T. Griffin, who was the railroad’s assistant general passenger agent. The Milwaukee Road’s town plat had more than 200 lots, with one-third of them intended for businesses along Main Street. According to a 1911 North Dakota Magazine article, Griffin already had a general store, a lumberyard and grain elevators. A newspaper story mentions that the George C. Bagley Company built the first Griffin elevator in 1910.
By 1917, when George A. Ogle & Company published the Standard Atlas of Bowman County, North Dakota, featuring Griffin on Page 10, there were nine businesses: a feed barn, lumberyard, stockyard, Godfrey W. Soderstrom General Merchandise store, a restaurant, a section house, the depot and two grain elevators. Regrettably, the names of the elevator owners were not listed.
The fate of those two elevators is a mystery, but Griffin’s third elevator, the one still standing, has a clear record of its lineage. It was built after 1917 and before 1923. The North Dakota Grain Dealers (NDGD), founded in 1911, published its first directory in 1923. Not all elevator companies were members of the association, but Griffin’s Farmers Union Equity elevator was listed. The directory was not published every year at first, but when it was published, the Equity elevator was listed until Harry Everett McKennett acquired it in 1929. The business continued to operate as the H.E. McKennett Elevator after his death in 1957, with his son H. Thomas McKennett as the owner-manager.
Peavey Company bought the McKennett elevators at Griffin and Bowman in 1964 and operated them until selling them to Bowman Grain Inc. in 1978, the last year any Griffin elevator was listed in the North Dakota Grain Dealers directories.
In 1980, Bowman Grain offered the Griffin elevator for sale by bid. Buyers submitted private offers, and Roger Stearns and his son Todd were the successful bidders. Todd says the elevator and the four 8,500-bushel steel bins added in the 1970s have been a good investment and are still in use.
The elevator holds about 28,000 bushels in six large bins and six smaller ones. It has a manual manlift and an operable Carter Day Disc Grain cleaner. The Stearns family has made many improvements to keep the elevator viable. They raised the drive shed to accommodate modern trucks; they paved the driveway and replaced the drive shed doors; they have kept the roof in good repair; and they replaced the elevator leg buckets. According to Todd, the leg still runs fine and has been powered by electric motors at least since the 1940s. The Stearns family never loaded grain onto railcars and removed the siding in the mid-1990s.
The Stearns family’s elevator is the last of Griffin’s original buildings still standing on its original foundation. Griffin is a ghost town. The schoolhouse is still standing, but it was moved into town from 2 miles away to be refurbished in the 1960s. The restoration never happened, and the building is still on the beams placed underneath it for the move. Griffin’s other original structures are gone or have collapsed. There were only 67 people living in Griffin in 1930 when the post office closed. Gradually, all moved away.
The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad filed for reorganization in 1977. It never recovered, and in 1982 the Burlington Northern Railroad (Burlington Northern Santa Fe, or BNSF, in 1996) acquired significant portions of the Milwaukee Road line through the Dakotas, including the section through Griffin. Today, BNSF trains pass the Stearns elevator and Griffin twice every day. They never stop.