The 6th Floor Blog: Past Forward: When North Dakota Was 'The Country of Lonely Old Women'

The North Dakota in this Sunday's magazine is one marked by rapid transformation, a place where oil derricks are springing up everywhere, and as the author of the cover story, Chip Brown, puts it, you might find "single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field." Striking black-and-white photographs by Alec Soth, taken in the Williston Basin, in the northeast corner of the state, accompany the article.

Soth's images are reminiscent of those that accompanied an article published by the magazine in 1995. In  "The Reopening of the Frontier," by Jon Margolis, the photographer Charles Harbutt captured scenes in and around Carrington, in North Dakota's center. But if there's an affinity between the two sets of pictures — mostly on account of their black-and-white palettes — the feeling of the two moments couldn't be more different. Where Brown is witnessing boom times, Margolis was writing about life in an emptied-out state:

What remains of human settlement in the rural Great Plains is a Federal welfare project, sustained by Government farm programs and even more by Social Security and Medicare. This is the country of lonely old women, the widows who don't want to move South and whose children have gone elsewhere to find jobs. There are small towns in western Kansas, in the Dakotas and in the Oklahoma panhandle where nothing thrives except the drugstore and the clinic, if there is one. Or maybe an ''antiques'' shop where the merchandise is really the detritus of several attics, and the proprietors are an elderly couple who don't have anything better to do.

Harbutt's photographs that accompanied Margolis's article, along with additional pictures from that trip that he provided to us, appear in the slideshow above.

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