Submitted Photo Taylor homestead. Circa 1910.

Situated in the sandhills of McHenry County, the third most populous cattle county in North Dakota, sits the Taylor Ranch. Over 120 years old, the ranch stands in the company of the most resilient homesteading families in North Dakota’s earliest history.

In 1900, brothers Alfred, Harvey, Thomas, and Alexander Taylor arrived from Montgomery County, Indiana. Alfred homesteaded on present-day Taylor Ranch in 1903. In 1905, Harvey filed a claim on an adjoining quarter of land. They started from scratch, with no railroad acres, open range or land purchases made with outside money.

Thomas and Alexander homesteaded a short distance away and, together, the four brothers operated a livery stable, a brick plant, and a cattle and horse ranch. The Taylors registered Purebred Herefords as early as 1915. Livestock were grazed on Taylor pastures, as well as on unclaimed surrounding land.

Life went well on the Taylor Ranch for nearly 20 years, until a series of tragedies took the lives of three men on the ranch within two years, in the 1920s. Harvey and his two sons died within months of each other – Harvey from blood poisoning, son Marshall was rammed by a steer, and son Clyde died of smallpox.

Harvey’s wife, Mary, and Clyde’s wife, Pearl, now widows, put the cattle out on shares, sold most of their personal property, and moved into town with Clyde and Pearl’s children, ages 1 and 3. Amid the Great Depression, the women must have weighed the option to sell the ranch. But they kept it and, as new generations of Taylors took the helm, the ranch was once again a successful operation. Today, the family credits the resilience of their strong, female ancestors for perseverance that kept the ranch intact.

Ryan Taylor, representing the fourth-generation to own and run cattle on the same place, once said, “The ranch isn’t the biggest in the state, comprising 3,200 of mostly contiguous acres of sandy rangeland and native hay meadows, but it’s never been a passive investment for distant shareholders or a holding that came without great hardship and sacrifice. It’s not a farming outfit, as 90 percent of the ranch land has never been broken. It’s a cowboy outfit that’s still managed from the back of a horse,” according to the June 2009 edition of The Cowboy Chronicle.

Over the generations, the Taylors were members of the North Dakota Stockmen’s Association, Towner Area Beef Promoters, Towner Area FFA Alumni, NDSU Saddle and Sirloin Club and many other organizations. Ryan Taylor has been honored by NDSU in areas of academics and agriculture. He served as the North Dakota senator from the 7th District from 2003 to 2013.

Exemplifying North Dakota’s western heritage and cowboy legacy, the Taylor Ranch was inducted to the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2010. Accepting the award on behalf of the Taylor family, Ryan said, “Cowboy ranches stay cowboy ranches when someone teaches the cowboy ways to the next generation.”

Proving this fundamental truth, Ryan and his wife, Nikki, passed the wisdom, pride and grit of their forebears to Taylor generation number 5.