Archaeologists in Bismarck have recovered seven coffins holding early settlers’ remains near the North Dakota governor’s residence, a discovery that overturns 1880s claims the old cemetery was fully cleared.
Contractors working the southwest corner of the property near 4th Street and Boulevard Avenue first hit human remains, coffin hardware, and fragments on May 19. Construction stopped. The State Historical Society of North Dakota ran a radar scan. A formal dig began Sept. 1.
Breitbart reported that crews located seven coffins containing human remains and a wooden box after checking more than 80 spots. Fieldwork wrapped in early September. The site sits beside the governor’s residence in Bismarck and once served as the city’s first community cemetery from 1873 to 1877.
Office of Management and Budget Facilities Management Director Brandon Solberg said the team finished its on-site work after that wide search. The remains now head into careful storage. Officials expect reburial at a local cemetery once archaeologists finish their study early next year.
OMB told People magazine that preliminary analysis of the remains inside the coffins identified two women, two men, two teenage boys, and a toddler. That mix tracks with the hard years when Bismarck was still a raw frontier town on the upper Missouri.
State Historical Society of North Dakota spokesperson Kara Haff put the find in plain historical terms. Officials in the 1880s believed the old burial ground had already been emptied.
Haff said:
"They had thought in the 1880s that they had exhumed everybody. There’s an article that says ‘we’ve moved everybody but two, and we expect that work to be done within the next week.’ Well, this has kind of proven otherwise."
The record shows the opposite. Most graves were moved. These seven were not.
The ground beside today’s governor’s residence held the town’s earliest community burials for only four years. After 1877 the cemetery fell out of regular use. By the 1880s local authorities treated the relocation as finished business. An 1880s account claimed all but two graves had already been shifted and the last pair would follow within a week.
They were wrong. The coffins and the wooden box stayed in the soil under what became prime state property. Contractors on a modern excavation project found them the hard way.
A November 8, 2012 Prairie Public piece by Jim Davis revisited the same ground through the eyes of an 1883 Bismarck Tribune reporter who walked the “Old Graveyard on the Hill.” The reporter’s language still cuts.
The 1883 correspondent wrote:
"here amid these irregular and rapidly decaying wooden headboards... are the lowly graves of the pioneers and frontiersmen who died fighting the battles, which were the passports of those who are now enjoying the peace and luxury on the very ground for which they fell."
He added another line that now reads like a warning:
"in a few short years they are forgotten, the weeds and wildflowers cover their graves and soon the music and laughter of wealthy, comfortable homes is heard above their bleaching bones."
That is exactly what happened. The governor’s residence and the surrounding neighborhood rose over ground that still held the dead.
In 2021, KXNET covered abandoned cemeteries across the region, including the Bismarck site. Morton County Commissioner Andy Zachmeier stated the obvious duty these graves impose.
Zachmeier said:
"These are the people that came and settled. These people paid a heavy sacrifice to start a life here, they helped build that county and the state of North Dakota."
Two women, two men, two teenage boys, and a toddler fit that description. They lived and died while Bismarck was still being carved out of open country. Their coffins sat undisturbed while the state capital grew up around them and while officials a century and a half ago declared the work complete.
The radar scan, the September dig, and the check of more than 80 spots finally corrected the ledger. Construction remains paused on that corner of the property. The remains will stay in secure storage until the archaeological analysis ends early next year. Then they are expected to receive proper reburial in a local cemetery.
No full identities have been released. No primary agency report has been published beyond the preliminary sex-and-age breakdown and the public statements from OMB and the State Historical Society. The wooden box’s exact contents have not been detailed. The specific construction project that first disturbed the ground has not been named in the available accounts.
What is known is enough. Seven coffins. A wooden box. A cemetery that operated from 1873 to 1877. An 1880s assurance that everyone had been moved. And a May-to-September effort that proved the assurance false.
North Dakota was built by people who took real risks on hard ground. When their graves turn up under the state’s own front yard, the least a decent society does is finish the job the 1880s left undone and put them back in the earth with their names, if they can still be learned, and with the respect they earned the first time.
