19th-Century Megafarms a Bonanza for Historians--and the Railroad : Pioneering: Operations covering tens of thousands of acres were created when the Northern Pacific Railroad sold off land it had received for free.

His was the last of the “bonanza farms,” the megafarms carved out of cheap land originally granted to a railroad making its way through the Dakotas in the late 19th Century.

And, even though he died a dozen years before she was born, F. A. Bagg is like an old friend to Michele Leininger.

Leininger is helping to restore Bagg’s Bonanza Farm, the last remaining example of the huge farming enterprises that drew settlers to North Dakota’s Red River Valley in the late 1800s, working land that the railroad got for free and sold for a profit.

The Bagg farm was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 and was registered as a state historic site the next year. Restoration was begun in 1989, and the farm was opened to the public last fall.

Volunteers have restored the bottom floor of the main building, where the family lived, although the upper floor dormitory remains off limits. The foreman’s house, including Bagg’s office and one-room store, also has been refurbished. The Bagg Farm Foundation eventually hopes to restore the entire complex.

As an undergraduate at Carleton College, Leininger dreamed of working for a museum. So, when she heard about the Bagg project, Leininger volunteered to do research.

There were no diaries or letters and only a few photographs, but F. A. Bagg kept accurate financial records. Leininger pored over payroll ledgers to determine how many people were employed on the farm. She used blueprints and pictures to re-create the farm layout.

Interviews with old-timers and two of Bagg’s children--both of whom have since died--filled in some of the gaps. A strong intuition helped her to complete the picture.

“I never feel there are ghosts, but when I’m sort of by myself I feel a sense of presence,” she said. “Especially in the kitchen area, I get a sense of the activity. I can read that a quarter of beef and three bushels of potatoes were cooked and I think, ‘How many people did they need to peel and cook those potatoes?’ I’m very much aware of those people and what it took to do that every day.”

The Red River Valley was an uncivilized outpost in the 1860s when a group of prosperous Easterners decided to build a northern rail route from Wisconsin to the Pacific Coast.

The Northern Pacific Railroad received one of the largest land grants in the nation’s history, including more than 11 million acres in North Dakota alone. Its major financial backer was Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke.

The railroad bridged the Red River in 1872 and was making its way across the Dakota Territory in 1873 when Cooke went bankrupt, sending the nation into a financial panic.

The railroad entrepreneurs were not willing to abandon their project, so they decided to sell off some of their land in the Red River Valley. Northern Pacific investors were given a choice: They could either get 10 cents on the dollar for their stock or they could trade it in for land. Pennsylvania lawyer J. F. Downing, among others, opted for real estate.

Bonanza farms were thriving in the Red River Valley by 1886, the year Bagg arrived to work for Downing, his uncle.

Nearby Mooreton was named for Hugh Moore, owner of the 13,200-acre Antelope Farm. Another major Northern Pacific stockholder was John Miller, later North Dakota’s first governor, who farmed 27,000 acres in Richland County and 32,000 acres in Steele County.

“It was a dramatic era,” said Hiram Drache, historian-in-residence at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. “In fact, bonanza farms were developed to create drama. Because, frankly, who wanted to come out to North Dakota?”

The Northern Pacific railroad alone had 1,500 agents in Europe recruiting workers, Drache said. The idea that immigrants could earn a bonanza on these giant farms was the 19th-Century equivalent of winning the lottery, he said.

Leininger said it was the railroad developers who realized the bonanza.

“The railroad men made money by selling land they had gotten for free,” she said. “At the same time, they created a need for the railroad. It brought workers to the farms and shipped wheat to mills in Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

Bagg made a deal with his uncle that he would remain for 20 years on the Downing farm if Downing would will to him one-fourth of the farm, buildings and equipment. When Downing died in 1913, Bagg used his inheritance to start his own farm.

The Bagg farm employed between 80 and 125 field hands and a dozen or more chore girls to help with cleaning, cooking, laundry and gardening. Drache says the largest bonanza farms employed 10 times that number.

All but a few bonanza farms died out in the 1920s, Leininger says.

“Most owners had several heirs, and their property was divided when they died,” she explained. “It was just an investment for them. They didn’t have roots in the land; they had money in it.”

Bagg was different. His wife, Sophia Larson, had been a cook on the Downing farm, and their children were reared on the two farms.

“The Bagg farm did fine when wheat prices fell during the 1920s. That’s partly because he was involved in the farming himself. And it was a working farm until his death in 1950,” Leininger said.

Drache believes megafarms like the bonanza farms are the trend of the future.

“We’re continuing to go toward larger farms because of man’s ability to handle more land with improved technology,” said Drache, the region’s acknowledged expert on bonanza farms.

“It’s inevitable (that) farms have to continue to grow in size because the demands of the people living on the land are greater. You need more acres to produce that income. Who wants to live on a small farm where you can’t make a decent living?”