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NEW TOWN Elbowoods, the name of a community and hospital once existing south of Parshall, lives on as the name of the new health center in New Town Elbowoods Memorial Health Center.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the new facility is Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at the site north of Fort Berthold Community College. It is not a hospital but will be a health center including 24-hour, seven-day-a-week emergency services.

The number of people still alive who actually lived in or near Elbowoods when it was a community is getting fewer.

Marilyn Hudson, Parshall, who is administrator of the Three Tribes Museum west of New Town, remembers Elbowoods, a community now under the water of Lake Sakakawea. Elbowoods was about 25 miles south of Parshall.

"Elbowoods was the agency headquarters. It never was an incorporated town. We didn't have a mayor or city council," said Hudson, who grew up near the Elbowoods community. Hudson, now 73, was 17 when she left Elbowoods.

"It was Elbowoods because there was an elbow in the river there," she said. "I suppose way back people referred to it as elbowoods because of the trees and the elbow in the river.

She said Elbowoods had a post office. "That was in the days before zip codes," she said.

The post office was established in 1891, the year the village was founded, according to "Origins of North Dakota Place Names."

The community also had a school with grades one through 12, said Hudson, who graduated with the last class at Elbowoods High School.

But she said the community's main significance was it was the headquarters for the Bureau of Indian Affairs agency for Fort Berthold.

May Coffey, of Parshall, who celebrated her 88th birthday Feb. 6, was born in a log cabin in the area called the Bull Pasture, between Elbowoods and Nishu, another Fort Berthold community now under water. She lived in the Elbowoods community and also near the community when she was growing up. Her father worked for the government when it wasn't yet the BIA, said Glenda Embry, Coffey's daughter.

"He worked with horses and cattle and stuff like that," Coffey said in a December story in the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Times.

"We lived in a government house in Elbowoods. I only went to school through the eighth grade. There were no school buses. We had to walk to school and carry our lunches," Coffey said in the story.

The house in Elbowoods where her mother grew up is now in Parshall, Embry said.

Coffey and her family moved when they built a new house at Buffalo Rock, about 10 miles south of Elbowoods on the road to Nishu, Coffey said.

Coffey went to Congregational mission school in Elbowoods. There also was a Catholic mission school there and later the Elbowoods School was built, Embry said.

The Elbowoods community also had a hospital run by the BIA.

"The hospital was built there in the mid-'30s and was there until about 1951. It closed before the dam, then they went to contract health care with neighboring hospitals and clinics," Hudson said.

Two of Coffey's 12 children were born in the Elbowoods Hospital. Coffey remembers the hospital had a men's ward and a women's ward, and it also had a birthing center.

After the hospital closed, the BIA continued to operate a clinic in Elbowoods. Because of the construction of the Garrison Dam and the area would be flooded, the clinic then closed and was moved to New Town in the 1950s.

"Elbowoods served mostly the local folks. Whenever they had critical illnesses, they went to Minot or Bismarck. It had limited services," Hudson said.

Dr. Herbert Wilson, a longtime physician on Fort Berthold Reservation who now lives in Bismarck, served the Elbowoods community and then moved to New Town, where he was for many years.

"Right in Elbowoods it was mostly agency people people connected with the Indian agency or the school. Almost all the Indian people lived on their allotments, and farmed and ranched. We lived about a mile from Elbowoods," Hudson said. Her father, the late Martin Cross, served as chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes.

With the construction of the Garrison Dam and Elbowoods to be flooded by the water of the reservoir Lake Sakakawea, Hudson said people from Elbowoods moved to higher ground at New Town, Parshall, White Shield and Mandaree.