Bonanzaville, USA
Near Fargo, North Dakota
Just west of Fargo, in West Fargo, the living-history village of Bonanzaville preserves the story of the bonanza farming era that transformed the Red River Valley in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. When the Northern Pacific Railway needed cash, it sold enormous tracts of flat Red River Valley land to investors at bargain prices. Speculators assembled farms of ten thousand to one hundred thousand acres, brought in steam threshers and armies of seasonal workers, and produced wheat on an industrial scale never seen before.
These bonanza farms made the Red River Valley one of the great wheat regions of the nation, before North Dakota even became a state. Bonanzaville recreates the era through about forty buildings moved to the site, including a one-room schoolhouse, a grain elevator, and original farm equipment. The name comes from those legendary mega-farms, whose owners briefly lived like mining barons on the northern prairie.
