Pembina: North Dakota's Oldest Town

You are at the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Dakotas. In seventeen ninety-seven, North West Company fur trader Charles Chaboillez paddled down the Red River and built the first trading post here, at the mouth of the Pembina River, calling it Fort Panbian. The Hudson's Bay Company followed six years later.

Then in eighteen twelve, Scottish and Irish settlers sponsored by Lord Selkirk built Fort Daer on the same ground, launching the first organized farm colony in the northern plains. Pembina holds the record for a string of North Dakota firsts: first European settlement, first school, first post office, first customs house, first homestead in the state. An eighteen eighteen treaty dropped the forty-ninth parallel right through the heart of the Red River Colony, pushing most settlers north into what is now Manitoba, but Pembina stayed American.

The town has been here ever since, small and steady, just a few blocks from the Canadian border.