Churchs Ferry: The Town the Lake Is Swallowing

Churchs Ferry was established in eighteen eighty-six when the railroad came through Ramsey County. It grew to a modest farming community, as hundreds of similar North Dakota towns did in that era. Then the water came.

Devils Lake, to the southeast, is the largest natural lake in North Dakota, and it has no natural outlet. Its level is controlled only by evaporation and by the Tolna Coulee, a spillway that only activates when the lake reaches a certain height. From the early nineteen nineties onward, the lake began rising dramatically due to higher precipitation and changes in drainage patterns. It expanded by more than a hundred thousand acres, swallowing roads, farms, and entire communities.

Churchs Ferry, which once sat comfortably inland, found itself at the edge of the advancing water. Buildings were moved or lost. The population dropped to single digits; the twenty twenty census recorded nine residents. The town was formally dissolved in twenty twenty two, and what remains is a ghost of itself, one of the most dramatic examples of a North Dakota farming town slowly consumed not by drought, as the Dust Bowl narrative might suggest, but by too much water.