Gardner, North Dakota, Stephen Gardner's Land
Near Fargo, North Dakota
Gardner is a small city in Cass County, North Dakota, about twenty-three miles north of Fargo. The first settlers arrived in eighteen eighty, and when the Northern Pacific Railroad extended its line to the site in eighteen eighty-two, the townsite was platted and named for Stephen Gardner, the landowner whose property the plat occupied. The post office opened in eighteen eighty-one, a year before the formal platting.
Gardner was one of more than twenty towns and villages that sprang up across Cass County in this era, each one called into existence by the railroad's advance across the Red River Valley. The county itself had been created by the territorial legislature in eighteen seventy-three, named for George Washington Cass, president of the Northern Pacific at the time. Gardner never grew large, but it survived as a small farming community north of Fargo.
