Simcoe Sons of Norway

July 18, 2009

Simcoe ND (population one, sometimes two or three) is located on a gravel road next to the Great Northern tracks -- three miles east of Highway 41. The sole resident, Mr. Dan Gilbertson, shirtless with a can of beer, came out to see what we were doing there. He told us the Sons of Norway building, a frame store-front structure with this beautiful, sun-baked mural of a Norwegian Fjord, was supposed to be moved to the Scandanavian Heritage Park in Minot, but the engineers concluded it would fall apart before it got too far down the road.

Although the building is over 100 years old, the mural celebrates the North Dakota Centennial of 1989. We didn’t measure but we could see it took up one and a half sheets of 4’x8’ plywood.

“We sure used to have some real parties there,” Gilbertson said. “We’d all get drunk and then get into it with the Germans who used to party there too.”

Simcoe is essentially a North Dakota ghost town. The bank vault is all that is left of the bank. There are a few buildings with No-Trespassing signs on them. Gilbertson’s house has about ten junkers parked around it. Then there’s the huge pre-WWII grain elevator where they used to load grain onto the trains. Lyle Henrickson remembers hauling truckloads to this elevator when he was a teenager.

According to “No Place,” by Douglas A. Wick (1988), Sincoe was establish in Hendrickson Township in 1910 by the Great Northern Railway. It was named by the RR officials for Sincoe, Ont., Canada, which in turn was named for John Graves Simcoe (1752 - 1806), British Revolutionary War veteran and Governor of Upper Canada, who is credited with opening up large areas of Canada for Settlement. The post office was closed in 1954 and the populaton of Simcoe was never more than 20.