Mooreton, North Dakota, Bonanza Farm Country

The town of Mooreton, in Richland County, started with an Austrian immigrant named Math Butala. He homesteaded in eighteen eighty-one, built the first house and store, and established a post office in eighteen eighty-two. He named the settlement Trieste, after his hometown of Trieste in Austria-Hungary. Two years later, on April twenty-first, eighteen eighty-four, the name was changed to Mooreton in honor of Hugh Moore, a New York-born landowner who ran an eight-thousand-acre bonanza farm nearby.

Bonanza farms were the defining feature of this Red River Valley landscape in the late eighteen hundreds: enormous corporate wheat operations run like factories, hundreds of workers at harvest, machinery in long lines across flat fields. The most famous survivor near Mooreton is the Bagg Farm, a seven-thousand-acre operation now recognized as a National Historic Landmark, one of the best-preserved bonanza farm complexes in the country.