The Center for Heritage Renewal at NDSU has put together a guide to centennials and jubilees across North Dakota this summer. Residents and travelers alike can access the guide through the center’s webpage at heritagerenewal.org.
According to center director Tom Isern, University Distinguished Professor of history, many centennials and quasquicentennials (celebrating 125 years) are being celebrated in the state.
“Centennials and jubilees really do go off like firecrackers on a string, the strings being the historic railways that stimulated settlement across the northern plains,” Isern said. “Railways generally were laid rapidly, with town-making taking place along the lines simultaneously, resulting in the same founding date for multiple towns along each line.”
Isern said ground zero for centennial celebrations this year is the area along Highway 200 west of the Missouri River. Towns were established with the building of the Killdeer Branch of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1913-14. That accounts for the centennials being celebrated this year in Beulah, Golden Valley, Dodge, Halliday, Dunn Center and Killdeer, North Dakota.
The Center for Heritage Renewal congratulates the communities celebrating a centennial or jubilee in 2014 and invites organizers to provide information about their festivities for the center’s webpage at heritagerenewal.org/centennial and its Facebook page, “Heritage Trails,” at https://www.facebook.com/groups/HeritageTrails/.
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.