NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
April 9, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
The zip code for Scranton, N.D., is 58653. It's the same for Gascoyne, the little town just east, but folks there still write "Gascoyne" in front of it for their return address.
The towns along the Milwaukee Railroad, built across southwestern North Dakota in 1907, started out even, but by pluck or luck some waxed and some waned. County seats like Hettinger and Bowman had the edge. Other towns, like Buffalo Springs and Griffin, live only in memory. Scranton has a retail business district, a high school, a thriving Scranton Equity and, of course, a post office.
Which Gascoyne doesn't. Gascoyne is one of those towns that, in the sorting process, has been reduced to a cluster of residences. In a two-story, white frame house in the southwest corner of town lives the last postmaster of Gascoyne, Gladys Erickson, 90 years old. She spreads out her life on the kitchen table.
She and her husband, Francis, moved up to this vicinity from Unityville, S.D., during hard times. Francis came ahead in 1932 with his outfit in an emigrant car, unloading at Reeder. Gladys followed after finishing the school term she was teaching. Here, while Francis farmed, she would teach a few years, raise seven kids, and on September 1, 1960, be appointed postmaster of Gascoyne.
After her appointment she and her husband moved into town, lived in the back of a store for a little while, and then moved into her present home. They ran the post office from their grocery store, a brick building that still stands in good condition on the west side of Gascoyne's main street. The Erickson store was the touchstone for the town in those days. Farming and coal mining kept a modest trading base going.
Gladys observed her 70th birthday on December 26, 1977, but there was a shadow over the celebration. This birthday meant she had to retire at the end of the year. She suspected that no successor would be appointed. Gascoyne would lose the post office. Sure enough, she says, on the 31st postal authorities arrived and "pushed me out."
The Ericksons kept the store for a while into 1972, then closed it. Francis passed away in 1994.
Near the Erickson store on the west side of main is the hardware store, also closed. On the east side at the north end is the lumber yard—closed. At the south end is the bowling alley—closed. The only place doing any business on this street is a tire swing hanging from its lone tree.
"When I first came here, I sorted mail for 65 people," counts Gladys. "Now there's 17." The townsite is becoming gap-toothed, as people have bought houses in Gascoyne and moved them to other nearby towns. Houses and barns move around a lot in this part of the country.
In front of Gladys's house, set in concrete, is an iron hand pump, about which she tells this story. It seems a previous resident of the house was a young girl, an invalid—maybe she'd had scarlet fever. Anyway, she couldn't attend school or go out. Every year the circus came to town. The circus people heard about her, and so they would bring the elephants over to the house and water them at that pump, so she could see them through the window.
Gladys vows, "As long as I'm here, they're not going to take that pump away!"
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866