Temvik: A Prairie Town's Three Names and One Fate

The story of Temvik, in Emmons County, North Dakota, is the story of the northern Great Plains in miniature. The settlement was platted in nineteen oh four under the name Godkin, then renamed Larvik in nineteen oh eight. When the nearby town of Templeton, named for the Tempel brothers, competed with it for the same rural trade, the two communities finally merged in nineteen eleven and took the blended name Temvik.

At its modest peak the town supported about two hundred residents, grain elevators, and a school. Its post office ran from nineteen eleven until nineteen sixty-eight, when it closed for good. Agricultural mechanization steadily reduced the need for farm labor across the Emmons County plains, and families drifted away one by one.

Today the townsite is farmland. Temvik is one of dozens of North Dakota communities that rose with the homestead era and faded when the economic logic that created them quietly disappeared.