The current official North Dakota highway map lists the population of Langdon, county seat of Cavalier County, as two thousand one hundred and one. When Langdon officially incorporated as a city on this date, February 25th 1888, newspapers at the time reported the population of the town as eighteen hundred. So don’t talk to the people of Langdon about out-migration or population loss. The town’s been growing at a clip of one point seven six people per year for the past one hundred and nineteen years! People had lived in Langdon for a few years before that official incorporation date, in fact there was something of a building boom in 1885, but the stampede of businesses and people to the area was on when the railroad survey crews came around in the summer of 1887. And in August of that year the original townsite was platted…through a field of barley.

Source: Langdon Centennial Book, 1888-1988

Written by Merrill Piepkorn

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