Charbonneau

3 photos · 2015

3 photographs tagged Charbonneau, 2015.

Oil pumpjack and storage facilities on a dirt road in North Dakota's Bakken Formation oil field. — Charbonneau sits in McKenzie County, North Dakota, within the Bakken Formation, the shale oil play that drove the state's drilling boom starting in the mid-2000s. The pumpjack and tank battery here are typical of Bakken wellsites, where crude oil is separated and held in steel storage tanks before being trucked to pipeline or rail terminals. McKenzie County has long ranked among North Dakota's top oil-producing counties. Many access roads to wellsites like this one remain unpaved, built and maintained by operators to reach wells scattered across the rural grasslands.

Abandoned wooden grain elevator stands in overgrown grassland near Charbonneau, North Dakota. — Wood-crib grain elevators like this one were built by farm cooperatives and independent grain companies across North Dakota from the early 1900s through the mid-20th century. Grain cribbing construction stacked dimensional lumber horizontally, plank by plank, to form the walls, a method chosen for its strength in holding the outward pressure of stored grain. Elevators of this type typically stood two to three stories tall with a peaked cupola or headhouse above for the conveying machinery, though many, including this one, have lost those upper features over time. Small-town elevators like this served as the local collection point where farmers hauled wheat and other grain to be weighed, stored, and loaded onto rail cars. Rail line closures and the consolidation of grain handling into larger regional facilities left many of these small-town elevators obsolete by the late 20th century.

Wooden grain elevator and outbuilding stand in abandoned Charbonneau, North Dakota farmland. — Charbonneau is one of the many small farming communities scattered across western North Dakota that lost its population base as agriculture consolidated through the 20th century. The wooden grain elevator here follows a crib-style design common to the region before concrete slip-form elevators became standard, with vertical boards stacked to form bins that held wheat and other crops until rail cars arrived for loading. Elevators like this one were typically built alongside branch rail lines, and their closure often followed the abandonment of those lines as larger, centralized terminals took over grain handling. The adjacent outbuilding would have served as a scale house or office for weighing and recording incoming loads from local farms.

Built in Minneapolis

Minneapolis Photographer

An ongoing archive of work.

Facebook Instagram Threads X Bluesky Flickr

© 1996–2026 Chad Davis