Thompson, North Dakota, A Name Problem Solved by a Storekeeper

When the railroad reached this stretch of Grand Forks County in eighteen eighty-one, the new settlement was called Norton, after George Norton, who owned the land the first buildings sat on. There was just one problem: a town called Norton already existed in nearby Minnesota, and the postal service would not allow two Nortons on the same mail routes.

So residents turned to Albert Thompson, co-owner of the local general store with his brother Robert, who had just been appointed postmaster on January twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty-one. The town took his name. Thompson was formally incorporated in September eighteen ninety-two and has grown modestly since, reaching just over eleven hundred residents by the twenty-twenty census. It is now effectively a quiet suburb east of Grand Forks, but the whole community exists under a storekeeper's name because the first one didn't work out.