Sometime later this month, the State Historical Society of North Dakota is going to officially announce the approval of a new historic neighborhood in Bismarck. I’m pretty excited about it because I live in it. Two years ago last week, the Highland Acres neighborhood in west Bismarck was named to the National Register of Historic Places, with its official new …
About 3½ years ago, a few residents of the Highland Acres neighborhood in west Bismarck sat down with some staff at the State Historical Society of North Dakota and began discussing the possibility of creating the Highland Acres Historic District and to nominate it for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. Today (Nov. 17), the Bismarck Historic Preservation …
OIL TO THE RESCUE A pair of Bismarck oil men, new to North Dakota and chasing the state’s first small oil boom, likely made the deal of their life in early 1952, acquiring almost the entire 127-acre tract of Highland Acres, complete with partially constructed streets, water mains, a couple of dozen good residents and the potential to earn a …
MOVING IN Here are the first 21 residents of Highland Acres, gleaned from the files of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Notice they are all just men’s names, the “heads of households.” We assume they all had wives as well. And probably children. I don’t have the dates of the purchase of each of these homes, but I’m …
1948: BUILDING HIGHLAND ACRES BEGINS The Bismarck Tribune reported in April 1948 that “Twelve houses are under construction in Highland Acres, the addition on the western edge of the city owned by the Bismarck Veterans Homeowners Cooperative Association.” The paper said that the housing co-op had also contracted for construction of nine additional homes. Looking over the building plans for …
WALLACE STEGNER: IN PRAISE OF COOPERATIVES In early 1947, the Bismarck Veterans Homeowners Cooperative Association’s management committee developed a mimeographed newsletter for mailing to co-op members and in one of its first issues included excerpts from an article written by the noted author Wallace Stegner in the April 1947 issue of the magazine “47,” noted by some as “The Magazine …
FINDING A NAME: HOW WE BECAME HIGHLAND ACRES The new development needed a name. Bismarck Tribune editor Ken Simons wrote a story for his paper announcing a contest would be held to name the subdivision and the streets within it. Entries were to be submitted to the committee, with an entry deadline of Aug. 12, 1946. On Aug.t 22, the …
HIGHLAND ACRES AND THE BISMARCK VETERANS HOMEOWNERS COOPERATIVE ASSOCIATION — PRODUCTS OF A PERFECT STORM Highland Acres Addition to the city of Bismarck, was a housing subdivision developed cooperatively by a group of returning World War II veterans in the 1940s and 1950s. Its success led to the subsequent development of nearby Highland Acres Second and Third Additions and Torrance …
Regular readers of this blog (both of you, as my friend, Dan Ulmer, likes to say in his weekly newspaper column, poking fun at himself to remind him not to take himself too seriously — I’m with Dan) will notice that I haven’t been very active here lately. That’s not because there hasn’t been much going on to write about. …