Abandoned School in Crystal Springs North Dakota

The old Crystal Springs School sits on a rise of grassland in Kidder County, North Dakota, its brick facade and parapet detailing typical of early 1900s rural school construction on the Great Plains. Schools like this one served small farming communities before state-driven consolidation efforts, which accelerated after the 1947 passage of North Dakota's school reorganization laws, closed hundreds of one- and two-room schoolhouses across the state. Crystal Springs itself was platted along the Northern Pacific Railway line and never grew beyond a small unincorporated community, leaving buildings like this school without a local population to sustain them once district boundaries were redrawn.

Photo taken in July 2015.