Mose: A Town Forgotten
By Mathew Neshiem, Staff Writer

Small towns are becoming an endangered species. In California, towns died with the gold rush. On the East coast towns have been absorbed into the growing metropolis. In the Midwest it is no different; small towns are forgotten and lost beneath forces larger than themselves as they gradually fade away. This is a story about a town in North Dakota - the town that blew away.
     Mose, N.D. was built around a Northern Pacific Railroad station located five miles north of Binford and officially founded in 1899 as Florence and Lewis. That changed on October 31, 1904, when a post office was established and the postal service rejected the name Lewis on grounds of duplication. A new name was borrowed from Morris Greenland, a local lumberyard worker, Mose.
     John Johnson met his wife Nellie at a dance in Mose while she and her sister were visiting her brother, a local minister. By 1943 their family was the hub of a town whose peak population was 25. Johnson ran the grain elevator for the train company, worked at the local store and served as post master. Nellie taught at the school and raised their seven children-six daughters and one son.
     On July 12th of that year, Johnson was fishing at Red Willow Lake with his neighbor Karl Sandbo and his son Ove Sandbo. As they returned home that evening, a tornado set down at McHenry and made its way west toward Mose, twisting trees out of the ground as it went. By the time Johnson returned home, Mose was on a collision course with one of the biggest storms in North Dakota’s history. The wind had already picked up into what was becoming a twister. Helen, one of John’s daughters, was 21 at the time of the storm.
     “I stood in the North window and watched the driveway go.” She said. Their wooden driveway, a bridge over the ditch at the front of their house, was carried away by the wind. Next, the air pressure built in the house until it blew out the west window.
     “It was terrible.” Bernice, Helen’s younger sister, describes the storm. “There was a strand of straw that was driven right into the wall.”
     “It came through the window on the west side.” Helen added.
With a window blasted open, the storm tried to make its way into the house. Helen first tried to hold a pillow over the window. However, the wind took that as well.
    “Shwist! It was gone, we never saw it again.” She said.
    

A Town Forgotten............

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