January 30, 2025 – The town of Burlington, 8 miles west of Minot, was a coal-mining town since its founding in 1883. The first Burlington mines were small operations that provided lignite coal for the local area and some for shipment to Grand Forks.
By the 1920s, Burlington’s small mines struggled, due to competition from large strip mining operations and the underground mines at Wilton, but the small coal mines still gave employment to about 70 miners. Of these, 30 were immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe.
As the Great Depression hit in 1930, the coal veins near Burlington had nearly been depleted. The mines provided some income for miners during the fall and winter months, but demand for coal declined as the economy worsened and the miners worked only a few days per week. Summer work on farms for the men also declined, since rainfall dropped below normal from 1928 to 1934. The miners were reduced to living in rented shacks.
During the dry summer of 1934, two local men, coal-miner Bob Oliver and businessman Einer A. Madsen, developed a plan to help the demoralized coal-miners and their families. The men sought funding from the North Dakota Rural Rehabilitation Corporation, the state agency created to channel New Deal funding to worthwhile projects. Mr. Oliver and Mr. Madsen asked for authorization to establish “homestead units” for unemployed miners on land near the junction of the Des Lacs and Mouse rivers, just northwest of Burlington. Miners would grow vegetables, mainly potatoes, in the summer and work in local coal mines in the winter. The construction of a dam would provide irrigation for the vegetables.
The plan, dubbed the “Burlington Project,” gained approval in November, 1934. The project eventually consisted of 35 housing units on plots of land eight to 10 acres in size.
On this date in 1936, a local newspaper reported that 15 of the homesteads in the Burlington Project would be built by the Huston and Mackley Construction Company of Minot. Each of the homesteads consisted of a modest-sized house, a small barn “for a cow or two,” a chicken house, and a pig shed “for several porkers.”
This federal resettlement project assisted 35 families until 1946, when the federal government ended its role in the Burlington Project, turning it over to the state of North Dakota.
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