North Dakota
A ‘showstopper’ wall rises in Medora, putting the Badlands’ true colors on display
MEDORA, N.D. — From its beginnings, the design concept for the future
Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library
in Medora was an ambitious one, a “journey through a preserved landscape … a continuum between past and present,” according to the international architecture giant Snøhetta, which was commissioned for the job.
The Oslo-based firm’s concept included elements it said would integrate the ethos of the man the facility was built to honor.
“Our design … is informed by the president’s personal reflections on the landscape, his commitment to environmental stewardship, and the periods of quiet introspection and civic engagement that marked his life,” Snøhetta announced.
As the exterior of the library nears completion and a grand opening is slated for July 4, 2026, the architect’s visionary concept is coming to life, highlighted during a tour of the site by a recently-completed, towering, rammed-earth wall.
Anna Paige / The Forum
The wall, which Snøhetta touted as “one of the most visually striking aspects” of its design, is daunting in scale, reaching 30 feet in the air toward a sprawling ceiling of exposed timber panels and beams, and stretching 240 feet across what will be the building’s main hall. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to the sedimentary striations of North Dakota’s Badlands, its rough-hewn surface is pocked and porous, with uneven layers, and an earthy palate of sand, stone, mud and dust.
The rammed-earth technique is an archaic one, with evidence of its use found as far back as 5000 B.C. The rammed-earth portions of the Great Wall of China are celebrated by the United Nations’ World Heritage Convention as “exceptional testimony to the civilizations of ancient China.”
The last time the technique captured North Dakotans’ attention was the 1930s, when the Works Progress Administration and Col. Paul Southworth Bliss in southwest North Dakota championed it as a fireproof and efficient means of home construction, according to a forthcoming book by Jim Fuglie and Lillian Crook.
In more recent times, the rammed-earth technique has gained newfound popularity due to its environmentally-friendly, sustainable process and energy efficient qualities, but up until last year, when Winn Construction in Dickinson took up the challenge to build it, no such large-scale rammed-earth wall existed in the state.
Willie Winn, the concrete company’s owner, and Kenny Jessop, a Winn supervisor who oversaw the project, have spent their entire careers in the construction business, but the rammed-earth technique was new to them.
In order to better understand the task at hand, Winn and his team traveled to visit large, public rammed-earth walls in Cheyenne and Sheridan, Wyoming. A consultant was brought in to help determine the critical recipe for the mixture of earth that would be used for the project as part of the learning process.
But after that, the Winn team was on their own to erect what was to be the centerpiece of the library’s interior.
“It really started at our shop in Dickinson,” Jessop said. “We started with a 10-foot-tall mock-up wall.”
Winn said a lot of trial and error went into determining the particular formula for the wall’s earthen mixture.
Tasha Carvell
Almost immediately, the team realized the local gravel they were using had too much moisture, necessitating the construction of a temporary structure on site to dry it out.
The process for building the wall is a particular and labor-intensive one. Jessop described how forms were placed first, into which the gravel mixture would be poured. Rebar was run down the middle to reinforce the wall. Then, the gravel was mixed with 10% cement, with varying pigment amounts to achieve the colored layers, as well as a small amount of water to create the particular rammed-earth formula.
After the appropriate mixture was achieved, it was fed from an auger-style mixer to a truck-mounted conveyor, or telebelt, designed to place concrete and other materials in hard-to-reach or elevated locations. From there, the mixture was poured into the forms. For safety reasons, the team worked on four feet of wall at a time, Jessop said.
“Every layer that you see was placed and compacted individually. First it’s placed in roughly 12-inch loose layers of the consistency of a good road base,” Jessop said. After that the mixture was tightly compacted, or rammed, into the final eight-inch layer.
The construction of the library’s rammed-earth walls took a 15-man crew just over three months and about 12,000 man hours to complete, Jessop said. Two million pounds of material were used in the process.
When Winn talks about the role the local company he founded in 1981 played in building the centerpiece design element of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, he calls the opportunity “a privilege.”
Jenn Carroll, the library’s manager of sustainability, called the team from Winn Construction “really wise” in the way they approached the daunting job.
Anna Paige / The Forum
“From the owner perspective, it’s really important to note that the willingness of Willie and his team to take on this piece of the project,” Carroll said. “We’re incredibly grateful because this is such a big piece of what we’re doing, and they were willing to learn this new craft. When we first peeled the forms back, I think for all of us there was some celebration because it’s just stunning and it’s pretty special that we can have a local artisan do this and not have to hire out outside of our area.”
While the wall is not a structural element of the building, it serves an important role for sustainability, Carroll said.
“It’s going to help with our energy, retaining heat in the winter, keep the space cool in the summer, helping with humidity and moisture in the air,” Carroll said. “Because it is a kind of porous element, indoor air quality will be improved by it. So while it has some aesthetic values, there’s a lot more purpose behind the behind the wall itself.”
“People are going to walk in that lobby and it’s going to be the showstopper,” Carroll said.
Theodore Roosevelt consistently ranks among the nation’s top five most popular presidents. On this upcoming July 4 holiday, 107 years after his death, T.R. is finally getting his own presidential library – but it’s not where you might think. That library is rising out of the prairie grass in the North Dakota Badlands – a 96,000-square-foot tribute to our 26th president.
It’s as grand as his likeness on Mt. Rushmore, except a lot more subtle, and that’s by design, says architect Craig Dykers. “Nature is transformative here,” he said. “It transformed Theodore Roosevelt, and it will transform new visitors to this library.”
Its gently sloping roof mimics the surrounding buttes, covered in native grasses and walking paths – yes, walking paths on the roof. The hope is they’ll get visitors up and out for a commanding view of Theodore Roosevelt National Park right next door.
“We wanted something that just felt primitive,” said Dykers. “And so, this form emerging from the Earth, it felt like it just arrived from the Earth.”‘ Dykers said.
Inside, a string of skylights will provide almost all the natural illumination the library would ever need, held up by walls made solely of compressed earth.
Everywhere we looked during our privileged sneak-peek back in March, it was hard to tell where nature ended and the library began. Its $450 million price tag is the biggest thing the small town of Medora, North Dakota, has ever experienced.
If you’re wondering why T.R.’s library is way out here instead of his native New York, it’s because were it not for his experiences way out here, Roosevelt said, he never would have been president.
Edward O’Keefe, CEO of the library, and author of the recent book “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President” (Simon & Schuster), said, “Theodore Roosevelt grew up as a sickly, asthmatic child who lived his life through books and imagination. So here he is, 24 years old, on the plains and Badlands of North Dakota, and he’s living the life he only read about in books.”
But the reason he took up residence in the Badlands is hardly a happy one, said O’Keefe: “He was a broken man, in a broken land, and nature was his healer.”
In a tragic twist, Teddy Roosevelt’s mother, Mittie, and his young wife, Alice, both died in the same house, on the same day: Valentine’s Day 1884. “The light has gone out of my life,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary – the date marked by a bold X.
“At the funeral of his wife and mother – it was a double funeral – he was so desolate and so depressed, that they were concerned for his own safety,” said O’Keefe.
After settling his affairs (which included asking his sister to raise his newborn daughter, Alice), he headed West, alone. He’d been to the Dakota Territory just a year prior to hunt a pair of bison – the two that still hang in Roosevelt’s Long Island home to this day.
He dug in, and began living a kind of life many Dakota cowboys thought he wasn’t prepared to live. They were wrong.
O’Keefe said, “I think he had a ‘life wish.’ He realized that no matter how rich you are, no matter how privileged you are, that you don’t know what’s going to happen next. If you want to get something done in this world, if you want to love somebody, if you want to accomplish something, you gotta go.”
And it’s that kind of rugged, raw, and real intellectual journey that the library wants visitors not just to look at and to grasp, but experience. “Library and museum are the two worst descriptions of what the TR Library actually is,” said O’Keefe. “It’s a call to adventure.”
It’s the kind of place that couldn’t have been built even five years ago, because artificial intelligence is such a large part of it. For example, you don’t have to imagine what it’s like to be in T.R.’s boots; you can actually see it.
O’Keefe said, “We have created the world’s first presidential archive in AI. Participants can come here to the TR Library, and have an in-person conversation with an avatar of T.R. You do not come unprepared for a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt; he will have none of it.”
It will be the only presidential library that will have hitching posts for your horse. You can take a nature walk on a mile-long path through the prairie. You can sit by a campfire and hear tall tales of life on the range, and step into his cabin at the Elkhorn Ranch.
But for all the fun, there’s a serious bent, too. He was a man of his times, and his times weren’t always flattering.
“I wasn’t interested in doing a legacy project for Theodore Roosevelt,” said T.R.’s great-great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt V. “There’s plenty of things named after him, plenty of statues. But the idea of just sort of basking in the glow of somebody and saying ‘This is a great man, let’s all look at him,’ isn’t particularly compelling. Normally, presidential libraries – it’s the principal [reason], the president trying to cement the first chapter of his legacy. In this case, we’ve got a hundred years-plus to be able to look back at his legacy, to really understand what that legacy is, what the lasting impacts were. We get to face those issues head-on.”
Including Roosevelt’s racist views of indigenous peoples, whom he often referred to as savages.
“We had a land blessing out here with the five tribes,” said Roosevelt, “to bless the land and really bring them into the project, so that we were working with them and making sure that their voices were heard, and that we were representing things appropriately.”
The library has taken possession of a statue of Roosevelt that was removed in 2022 from outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Critics argued that the message of a White man elevated above both a Native American and an African symbolized racial superiority.
“We are here to preserve the life and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt,” said O’Keefe. “I think it’s important that we eventually do something that contextualizes it appropriately, but not at the opening.”
If the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library has any message, it’s that courage and strength often come from personal tragedy, mis-steps, mistakes, and misunderstandings. As he famously said, it’s being in the arena that counts. And that, more than anything, may be the hindsight the library has to offer.
“He does not like the critic,” said O’Keefe. “He does not like the person on the sidelines pointing out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. He likes the person who tries and fails. That’s a powerful lesson for today. I want kids in particular to come in and understand that if you want to change something in this world, you have got to be the source of that change.”
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Story produced by Aria Shavelson. Editor: George Pozderec.
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North Dakota
In ‘last chapter,’ North Dakota son who made ultimate sacrifice in World War II comes home
DAHLEN, N.D. — A spectacular summer day with blue skies, puffy clouds and a light breeze served as a perfect backdrop for the homecoming for a North Dakota hero of World War II.
Hundreds of people came to pay respects to U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Irvin C. Ellingson on Saturday, June 20, in his hometown of Dahlen, North Dakota, 55 miles northwest of Grand Forks.
His funeral and burial were the culmination of three days worth of ceremonies, remembrances and celebrations for the extended Ellingson family, friends and community members.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
Brittany Jallo, a great niece to Ellingson, said the family has never let him be forgotten.
“It’s so surreal, it’s like I’m smiling and crying at the same time,” she said.
Terry Ellingson, one of Irvin’s nephews, said they can finally put him to rest alongside other family members.
“It’s a real gift to us, and it’s something that we don’t have to keep wondering about anymore,” he said.
Contributed / Lon Enerson
This was a day many prayed for
but feared might never come.
Ellingson, then 25, was working as a radar operator aboard a B-29 Superfortress that had completed a combat mission over Tokyo when it was fired upon by a Japanese fighter plane on April 14, 1945.
He and other crewmen parachuted safely, only to be captured by the Japanese military and held as prisoners of war. The American POWs in the Tokyo military prison died tragically six weeks later when a fire, sparked by U.S. bombing runs and high winds, swept through the wooden building.
Contributed
Positive identification of remains seemed almost impossible. But almost exactly one year ago, with the work of
forensic anthropologists using advanced DNA technology
and persistence by family members, it happened.
Lon Enerson, another of Ellingson’s nephews, spearheaded the years-long effort and plans to finally bring Ellingson’s remains back home.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
Enerson, now living in St. Cloud, Minnesota, grew up a few miles from the farmstead where Ellingson was born and raised.
He’s been trying to write a book about his uncle Irvin for four years.
“The book’s on hold, of course. I never knew we’d get this last chapter,” he said.
Ellingson’s remains arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii, early Wednesday, where family members waited on the tarmac.
“It was such an intimate experience for all of us, something that I’ll never forget, really,” Enerson said.
A contingent of law enforcement officers and motorcyclists escorted his remains north.
On Thursday, another convoy brought Ellingson’s remains
from the Fargo Air Museum to Grand Forks
for a ceremony featuring Gov. Kelly Armstrong, Sen. John Hoeven and Rep. Julie Fedorchak.
A family celebration on a rural Nelson County farmstead filled the day Friday leading up to Saturday’s farewell.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
At Dahlen Lutheran Church, one of Ellingson’s dress uniforms was on display in his open casket, with his wrapped remains situated toward the top.
His remains, and those of 61 other U.S. servicemen who perished in the Tokyo military prison fire,
first arrived at a forensic lab in Honolulu
in spring of 2022, where the painstaking work of identification began.
Many Ellingson family members contributed DNA to assist in that process.
Two forensic anthropologists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, working in that lab in Hawaii, helped identify Ellingson’s remains.
The family grew so close to Kristen Grow and Melissa Menschel,
they invited them to Ellingson’s farewell. To many family members’ surprise, the two women were able to make the trip.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
“Everybody keeps thanking us, but we thank them for allowing us to be part of this process, for them having that persistence in the beginning, and then trusting us with this profound responsibility,” Grow said.
“We don’t interact very often with families unless they come to our lab, and so this is a rare opportunity for us … so we said we can’t miss it,” Menschel said.
The funeral featured music and scriptural readings from many extended Ellingson family members.
Enerson played the trumpet in several orchestral arrangements, and four other Ellingson nephews sang beautiful harmonies.
In the homily, Pastor Val Teppo spoke of the letters Ellingson wrote home to his family, saying it was time for him to get home.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
“Today isn’t the homecoming I am sure he was envisioning then when he wrote those letters, but more than 80 years later, Irvin is indeed coming home,” Teppo said.
Col. James Schlabach, commander of the 91st Missile Wing at the Minot Air Force Base, spoke of how Ellingson, at age 22, during the deadliest conflict in history, raised his right hand and said he was ready to serve.
“What I’d like to do as a final thank you on behalf of a grateful nation, a grateful U.S. military, is offer Staff Sgt. Irvin Ellingson one final salute,” Schlabach said.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
He left the lectern, approached the casket, and fired off a sharp, solemn salute.
Attendees loaded onto buses for the convoy to Middle Forest River Cemetery, just a few miles away on gravel roads.
First, the silver hearse carrying Ellingson’s casket had an important stop.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
It was driven onto the farmstead where Irvin once lived with his parents, Tommy and Ella Ellingson, and seven siblings — the place where the family spent many waking hours, wondering whether Irvin would ever come home.
The old farmhouse is no longer but the property is still very much in the family, as Ellingson’s great niece Brittany Jallo, her husband and children built a home there.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
The hearse circled the driveway and paused, looking out onto the rolling hills and creeks for one final farewell, as children waved American flags and a family member in Marine Corps blues stood at attention.
Chris Flynn / The Forum
The convoy proceeded to the cemetery for final military honors, which included the flyover of a B-52, a long-range strategic bomber from Minot Air Force Base.
With attendees craning their necks toward the sky, the plane’s wide wings appeared a stark contrast to fluffy clouds as it flew by.
At the conclusion, one attendee who said he wasn’t a family member, thanked Enerson and everyone involved for what he described as “an experience of a lifetime.”
Chris Flynn / The Forum
BISMARCK — North Dakota is experiencing losses on nearly every commodity outside of beef and cattle and the state is working toward finding solutions to the ongoing loss of cropland value. At the same time, costs have increased at a faster rate than farmers are used to. North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring describes it as “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
“It’s not any one thing that’s taking farmers to their knees,” he said. “I needed to get a certain sensor in the fuel pump and that fall before COVID, we were coming out of a kind of a tough year and it was $1,700. I said, ‘Let’s just wait and put it in next spring.’ Well, next spring came around and it was $3,200. I mean, holy cow. And nothing changed. So, there just seems to be some opportunistic type of practices going on.”
Rules and regulations don’t seem to be helping. For Goehring, a look at certain regulations would be a good step. One example is the Regional Haze Rule adopted by the EPA in 1999, mandating that states develop and implement air quality protection plans to reduce the pollution that causes visibility impairment. North Dakota, with a clean coal emission in place and operating at 19 parts per million, was disadvantaged.
“You had air emission standards in Pennsylvania that were operating at 200. Then the memorandum came from the administration and EPA that you had to cut those emissions in half. How the heck do you cut 19 or 18 parts per million in half?” he said.
American culture has brought more hurdles, too.
Tom Campbell, USDA state director for Rural Development, notes the rise of GLP-1 drugs. People are eating less sugar, bread and starches, which could be hitting some key sectors regionally. Combined with rising expenses and fixed costs, it becomes a “double whammy.”
“You have to harvest everything, and hopefully we can get some big yields to offset some of the losses,” Campbell said, noting that weight-loss drugs may be “changing habits” among consumers.
“… I don’t know if it’s for sure or not, but we’re concerned about the future there, too.”
A bright spot for the region, but an unfortunate development for others, is drought in the Pacific Northwest. Low moisture levels there have added dollars to other markets.
“Unfortunately, somebody else’s disaster is our benefit. But, usually, that’s what it takes: somebody else’s problems to fix our problems,” Campbell said.
With prices, it’s a waiting game. High prices are generally thought to correct themselves with low demand. What can be controlled, Goehring believes, is the way rules and regulations are considered.
Measurable outcomes could give detailed accounts of the domino effect that takes place with either implementing regulations or taking them away.
“There has to be some measurable difference on a basis at which the public can derive some value from a rule or regulation that goes in place. Because every one of them is impacting our daily lives, whether it’s at home, on the road or in our businesses,” Goehring said.
Digital Content Producer and Sports Reporter at the Grand Forks Herald since December of 2020. Maxwell can be contacted at mmarko@gfherald.com.
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