Trending
Editorial Note: This column is continued from Aug. 10.
Like Villard in its infancy, the residents of Burlington, in its earliest days, were looking forward with some confidence to the arrival of a railroad at their location. Minnie Gasmann had mentioned the arrival of Northern Pacific surveyors at Gasmann Coulee in the fall of 1882. The annual report of the Northern Pacific Railroad for the fiscal year July 1, 1882, to June 30, 1883, mentions such a survey.
In the section devoted to the Jamestown and Northern Railroad, we find this sentence: "A line from Carrington northwesterly to the Mouse River has also been surveyed." It is not clear how far up the Mouse River Valley the surveyors went, perhaps as far as the Canadian border, or to the Dominion, as it was often identified then.
When James Johnson, one of the founders of Burlington, was filling out an application to become the Burlington Postmaster, several questions on the form related to railroads. One question asked for the name of the nearest railroad and another for the name of the nearest railroad station. Johnson wrote that the nearest railroad was the Jamestown and Northern Railroad and the nearest station was at Carrington - 95 miles away.
These two answers more or less duplicate what was said about the survey in the Annual Report for 1882-83. A third question dealt with the distance of the post office from a possible railroad. Johnson's reply was a detailed one: "The Jamestown Northern will extend up here in time and we (the post office) will be south of track 50 rods." It seems the surveyors had shared their work with Burlington residents at the time of the survey in the fall of 1882, or at some later time before the fall of 1883. Johnson's application was dated October 24, 1883, at which time Burlington was still in Stevens County.
Subsequent Northern Pacific Annual Reports make no further mention of the rail line surveyed from Carrington to Burlington and beyond in 1882. The next opportunity for a railroad that presented itself was when the Manitoba Road reached the "Second Crossing of the Mouse," the name by which the future location of Minot was referred to in the summer of 1886. A decision to lay a right-of-way across Erik Ramstad's farm immediately west of this Mouse River crossing was made by Saturday, July 24, 1886.
The railroad bridge built at the Second Crossing of the Mouse is still at its original location, despite the many floods that have occurred in town since 1886 and despite all the man-made changes to the river, especially cutting through loops, so as to straighten the river's course within city limits and to lessen the danger of flooding.
This railroad bridge lies underneath the Third Street Northeast viaduct. The original name for Third Street Northeast was Belyea Avenue, so named in honor of Dr. Edmund Belyea, Minot's first resident doctor and the city's second mayor. The year 2026 marks the 140th anniversary of this modest-sized Second Crossing bridge, which was first built to accommodate two tracks running east and west. But it has been widened to include a third such track now. Two of these tracks are mainline tracks, the third a yard track.
West of the future site of Minot, Chief Engineer Miller had ordered two lines surveyed: one passing through Burlington, up Coal Bank Coulee and from there up to the prairie, and the other across Gasmann Coulee. It seems likely, in the absence of other evidence, that the decision as to which line to follow was essentially an engineering one. (A conclusive answer to this matter would probably be found in the pages of the Burlington Reporter newspaper, which had begun publication in April, 1886. But copies of the Reporter from the summer of 1886 are scarce - if any still exist!)
Joseph Colton and Lucius Lincoln stopped over in Villard en route to Devils Lake on Sunday, August 15, 1886. They stayed at the hotel run by Emma Nichols, and also spoke with Richard Copeland about doings in Burlington. With obvious dejection, they told Copeland that the Manitoba Road engineers "have seen fit to locate the road some two miles or more south of Burlington." In other words, the Gasmann Coulee option had prevailed over the Burlington and Coal Bank Coulee option. (See page four of the Villard Leader for Saturday, August 21, 1886.)
To be continued…
M.L. Berg of Minot enjoys researching local history.