The Ghost Map

Bringing life to the ghosts of North Dakota's past

FARGO - What began as a failed promotion by two radio disc jockeys has turned into a quiet effort to breathe life into North Dakota’s ghost towns.

The project is called Ghosts of North Dakota, started eight years ago by two native sons who had planned to overnight in haunted locations. That never took off, but the idea of documenting history and visualizing days gone by appealed to Terry Hinnenkamp and Troy Larson.

Their goal, Larson said, is to keep taking photos until there are none to take.

“If we can do something in a non-in-your-face way to spur restoration or renovation in any of these places, we would be all about it,” Larson said. “But we don’t like to be too political either.”

Their website, http://ghostsofnorthdakota.com , has photographs from 100 faded or fading old towns, along with whatever brief history that could be gleaned about the place. Their work shows remnants of humanity, but more often features no people, light poles, cars or anything else that might compromise the authenticity of a photo.

Their most recent post features the town of Forbes, on the South Dakota border, where they made photos of a stone house museum, school, post office, bank and saloon. One striking picture shows a square wooden house, fairly intact, flanked by a barn settling to its knees and a third, smaller building that’s fallen to little more than a pile of wood.

“On nearly every trip, we go out looking forward to seeing a certain town, but on the way home, we realize another town was better or more fun. Forbes was that town on this trip. The pleasant surprise,” the duo writes.

The website has more than 10,000 followers on Facebook . Some fans have become contributors; about one-fourth of the material on the site is submitted.

Mark Johnson, 35, of Fargo, has posted work from the towns of Omemee, Temple and Brantford.

“What’s really neat is when they have the galleries posted, folks will see them and will retell all their memories about back in the old days,” Johnson said. “It’s fascinating to read them, and lots of times people from these towns are re-connecting through this project.

Book Review: The Ghost Map | David D. Harlan

, By Steven Johnson, Riverhead, 2006

Set in 1850s London, The Ghost Map is a superb detective tale of urban density, disease, fortitude, and plumbing. Steven Johnson tells, with page-turning mastery of urban and scientific detail, how the great metropolis was saved from cholera by one doctor’s pursuit of a microbe. Think Nova meets Sherlock Holmes, with Dickens providing local color.

Johnson brilliantly portrays London, the first modern mega-city. In 1854, the population density of the city’s Soho district was 432 per acre, or 276,000 per square mile. Compare Boston’s South End, with 21,000 per square mile, or New York’s Lower East Side with 101,000. Triple that to approximate the human packing of Victoria’s Soho, and still you’d be clueless of its malodorous, vomit-inducing stench: streets steeped in manure, shops teeming with livestock slaughter, tanneries, all manner of coal-fired industry — each emitting pungent airs. Worse was the reek of excrement pooling in fetid courtyards and cellars: as rural people poured into London, tripling its population in 50 years, human waste clogged the ancient system of cesspools and dung-handlers. Newly fashionable “water closets” made matters worse: the average household flushed 244 gallons daily into non-existent sewers. Enter the epidemic. Bacteria Vibrio cholerae had been around for millennia, checked by the human instinct against ingesting excrement, and widespread taste for the salutary antimicrobial effects of alcohol and tea. But London’s lethal stew was a perfect host for cholera outbreaks that decimated neighborhoods every few years. Johnson describes London as “permanent, rolling disaster, a vast organism destroying itself by laying waste to its habitat.”

Click here to read more of Robert Taylor’s review .

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

The ghost map, a street, an epidemic and the two men who battle to save Victorian London

GHOST MAP, THE, A STREET, AN EPIDEMIC AND THE HIDDEN POWER OF URBA

Image Analysis and Recognition, 7th International Conference, ICIAR 2010, Povoa de Varzim, Portugal, June 21-23, 2010, Proceedings

Proceedings