By Megan Torgerson
Megan Torgerson: Dagmar, Montana, age 117, passed away peacefully, surrounded by her adoring family on June 25, 2024.
[tape of the Hans kaleve song, post up and come under narration]
Megan: After suffering years of population loss, closed businesses and devastating fires, Dagmar died. At least I think she did.
As dead Montana towns go, Dagmar was an eccentric one. To start, she was very Scandinavian, Danish more specifically. Lutheran farmers sailed across the Atlantic, and then traveled nearly 2,000 more miles to get to this spot on the plains. She was way up there – in a corner of Montana that’s almost Canada and almost North Dakota. At one point in her life, Dagmar became a Communist, but more on that later. She died after her church burned down and her only restaurant and general store closed their doors.
During a last gasp, generations of her descendents gathered at her cafe. They filled the tables to enjoy one last meal together and sing to her in her mother tongue. Danish flags hang on the walls.
Pictures in sepia, black and white and color show Dagmar residents in front of their shops, in parades and wearing softball uniforms. Their trophies sit on a piano.
Dagmar’s final years were quiet ones out on the prairie. She was hours from the cute mountain towns filling up with fans of the show “Yellowstone.” This was not where TV shows and movies were based. What remains of Dagmar are two paved blocks and an in-town population of 10 residents surrounded on all sides by acres of wheat.
So what was life like for a Danish colony in frontier Montana? And if I’m right – if she really is dead – then what exactly killed her?
I want to know because my own story is linked to Dagmar’s. If a newspaper really did declare the town dead and ran her obituary, my name, and those of my family and neighbors, would be among the ones listed way down at the bottom.
“Dagmar is survived by Megan Torgerson, her parents, Russell and Renny Torgerson, Kay and Brian Brinkman, Doug Smith, Paula Theusen, Kim Rudnigen, Tom and Jandy Jorgensen, Ralph Summers…”
Ralph: All around Dagmar, there was a lot of people too.
Tom: it was a special place for a lot of people at one point, um, for many, many years too.
Kim: as kids there was just a lot going on downtown, so you could always find something to do or um, you know, some sort of hike to go on or adventure
Jandy: it was like, um, it was a family. didn’t know it at that time that how close knit that family was at the school.
Megan: The plains are greening and the rivers swell as I drive back to my hometown to sort through what’s left and talk to the people who knew Dagmar best. In the car with me is my one-year-old son, Connor.
[Scene tape Connor babbling and grandparents responding]
Megan: And my parents, Renny and Russ
Russ Torgerson: It’s windier up here. You know, it. I feel it. You can hear it.
Megan: You know, I’m working on this story about the obituary of a small town. Yeah. Do you guys think Dagmar is dead or dying?
Russ: Yeah, it’s pretty much done for, I think, I mean, there’s no people left Megan. So it’s kind of like a ghost town, right?
Megan: This is the first time I’ve been back since having a baby. My parents, the last of my immediate family to live in Dagmar, moved across the state to Missoula. That was three years ago. My grandparents are long gone.
While our farm is 10 miles south of Dagmar, it’s the closest thing I have to a hometown. After a full day in the car, we hit the familiar washboard road leading up to the house. When we arrive, I spot a mound of dirt and gravel spilling from the lawn onto the driveway. The source: a badger that’s moved in since my parents left.
Two football-sized holes in the yard stare back at me. I walk around them to the front door, carrying Connor on my hip. Inside, the house smells stale. But I remember when it felt alive. Mom was always baking something – cookies, cakes, chocolate zucchini bread or scotcheroos. People came and went from the entryway where I stored my tenor sax in junior high. Sometimes, we’d even bring baby calves to this spot to warm them up. Our weiner dogs would curl around them to keep them warm.
My dad, with his red and white Playmate lunch box in his hand and a border collie at his side, was always the first one out in the morning. My sisters would be leaving for school and making plans for what happened after: basketball practice, 4H, speech and debate. My mom was always shuttling one of us somewhere or heading to town for parts or supplies. As the youngest, I’d watch the house slowly empty out until the day came for me to board the bus and ride 18 miles to school.
Inside the kitchen, the calendar is flipped to the last time anyone was here – six months ago. It’s next to a list my mom started with things her daughters want to claim. Lori wants the Bavarian tea cups, Kathleen the blue vase with the flowers mom painted, Louise the mid-century Santa decoration. I want the marble horse bookends.
My family leaving Dagmar has certainly brought the town closer to her end – but it’s a trend that started a long time ago.
Doug Smith: Well, it’s, it’s a matter of all these farms, all those, those half section homesteads gradually, uh, getting bought up and consolidated.
Megan: That’s Doug Smith. He’s like our town historian. For a long time, he was a planner with the county. Now he’s in his 70s and still the towering figure I remember – six-foot-seven with a graying, braided pony tail.
Doug: And so you keep losing members in your community. And, uh, so, so the marker for a, a town dying is first your, your school closes, then the bar closes. And you’re left with a post office. Now when I drive through the countryside, I basically see ghosts of, of farmsteads and people that used to live there. And in some places there’s not even a trace of anything left but a bare field, you know?
Megan [on tape]: Mm-hmm. How does that make you feel?
Doug: Well, it’s kind of sad.
Megan [on tape]: Yeah.
Megan: I can imagine a future where my parents’ house caves into the windswept plains. For as long as I can remember, abandoned houses have dotted the landscape.
I remember poking around some of those old buildings when I was a kid. In summer, after checking crops or making sure the cattle had water, I’d peer through broken windows and imagine what life was like for the people who once lived there. How they might have smoked a pipe on the porch after a long day in the field. How they made chokecherry syrup over a coal burning stove or warmed up with hot cocoa after skating on a frozen pond.
This is the Dagmar I like to envision.
But to be clear, Dagmar wasn’t Dagmar, Sheridan County wasn’t Sheridan County and Montana wasn’t Montana for a long time. Before this was even the U.S., these grasslands were where the Assiniboine, Metis, Blackfeet, Sioux, and other tribes lived and hunted. That was before the government forced them out. So it was after the brutal wars and the also-brutal treaties that the White settlers moved in – including my ancestors. Doug’s too.
When his grandfather broke the prairie to plant crops, he was reminded it hadn’t always been his.
Doug: There was a Metis guy sitting on that buffalo rubbing rock with a feather in his cap. And, and basically he said, you’re turning the prairie upside down.
Megan: Danish immigrants from North Dakota and Minnesota dreamed up Dagmar. They planned to build a haven for Danish-American Lutherans in the newly minted state of Montana. That was early in the 20th century, when settlers were flooding west to claim cheap land. The founders searched around before finding the right spot. They claimed it. Then they named it Dagmar after a former queen of Denmark.
Over time, more and more settlers arrived to this colony on the Northern Great Plains, lured by the government to start farming. My family came from Norway, Denmark and Germany 115 years ago. Doug Smith’s has been here for even longer.
Doug: Our ancestors came in the early 19 hundreds mm-hmm. As the wave of homesteading spread from east to west. My ancestors came in 1903.
Megan: Like many towns in the West, Dagmar went from boom to bust.
Just after Doug’s family arrived, Dagmar consisted of a post office in a one-room house. When Dagmar turned four, she got her first permanent building, the Nathanael Lutheran Church. It held services in Danish. In the nave of the church, the congregation hung a red and white ship, like the one that carried people there across the ocean. Seven years later, Nathanael’s sister church, the Volmer Kirke, was built. That’s where I was baptized, one crisp winter morning 75 years later.
Dagmar had a bank, a bar, a service station and, at the center of the community, the Dagmar store. It sold groceries, clothes, hardware, and meat and eggs from local farmers.
And in her youth, Dagmar had a surprising rebellious streak. I ask Doug about it.
Megan: Could you tell me about the communist history? Is that something that you ever heard of growing up? Or did this really touch this part of Sheridan County?
Doug: Well, it did. Um, and my dad talked about it.
Megan: What did he say?
Doug (laughing): Um, I really don’t want to say because I don’t want to incriminate my neighbors so.
Megan: this can be off the record, Were my family communists?
Doug: No, no. I think it was that, that in the late twenties, all the, the banks went bankrupt out of business right before the depression, so there were a lot of dissatisfied and broke people and they wanted something different.
Megan: As a result of that, a Communist movement thrived among Northeast Montana farmers. During the 1920s, it was Communists who filled Sheridan County’s state legislative seats and nearly all local government positions. As a county planner, Doug saw that history etched into the layout of Medicine Lake, the town near Dagmar where I went to school.
Doug: The streets were Engles and Marx streets.
Megan [on tape]: Oh, wow.
Doug: That gave you a clue of what was going on there.
Megan: At that time, Plentywood, the county seat, became the improbable headquarters for the Producers News, a newspaper that spread class consciousness to farmers. The Communist streak eventually simmered down, and the newspaper closed in the late thirties. But the area’s reputation continued.
Doug: Because in the fifties, dad said the FBI came to see him and asked him to keep an eye on his neighbors.
Megan: Doug’s dad was Big Ed Smith, a tall farmer who kept Dagmar in the political lime light. In the 1970s, Ed ran for Montana Governor on the Republican ticket.
Doug: He’s definitely made a difference. He was sort of a maverick.
Megan: Big Ed served two decades in the Legislature – making the trek to Helena for the sessions that meet every other year. But he did not become governor in 1972.
Doug: I think the timing was wrong just because that was the seven ties and the cultural revolution was going on at that time. So the, the cards were probably stacked against him.
Megan: The ‘70s offered Dagmar another sort-of boom. That’s when people my dad’s age moved back to the area. They saw Dagmar as a good place to farm and start families of their own. Farms were smaller then and there were a lot more of them – they raised wheat, cow-calf pairs and their own kids. For entertainment, they had softball leagues, card parties and, crucially, the Dagmar Bar. Tom Jorgerson is a jovial farmer who still lives near Dagmar – his place is just north of town.
Tom Jorgerson: It was a special place for a lot of people at one point, usually in the afternoon … and especially during the winter times, the town would kind of fill up. People would come and get groceries or they’d go to the service station, get a tire fixed, and usually they migrated across the street to where the bar was and then would tell stories there for a couple hours before they went home.
Megan: The bar was like the beating heart of Dagmar. It’s where all the local characters hung out. Walking into the bar in the ’60s or ’70s, you’d see Noel LaVallie sitting there on a stool. He played guitar, was good with horses and worked as a ranch hand.
Russ: He was from our area down Sandhill country.
Megan: That’s my dad, Russ, reminiscing with his friend Paula Theusen over a nibble of krumkake, a traditional Norwegian waffle cookie.
Paula Theusen: He used to come to the bar, and of course, you know, he would get pretty well tanked.
Megan [on tape]: Mm-hmm.
Paula: But the kids loved him because he’d always give him quarters. They had an old Pacman machine over there, so the kids, then he’d give the quarters.
Megan: Paula’s one of the 10 people who live in Dagmar-proper today. I heard lots of stories like this growing up. But by the time I was born, the bar was closed. The thing about a place like Dagmar – where the boom’s over and all you know is bust – is that nostalgia is baked into how you view everything. My hometown to me was almost like a grandma I only knew in the last years of her life. So I met up with Paula Theusen so she could tell me about Dagmar in her prime.
[Scene tape greeting Paula and Kim: Morning. Good morning. How are you? Good. I hope you don’t mind. I’m rolling off just wearing my headphones…]
Megan: I meet Paula in the now-closed Dagmar store, which got its start in 1916. I have a soft spot for Paula. She wears her short white hair in a pixie cut and has big round glasses. She’s fun to talk to and has the kind of warm and playful mischievousness of an elf, like one from Scandinavian Christmas lore.
Megan [on tape]: How has Dagmar changed over the years?
Paula: People have passed on, moved away. Some of the families who had family farms have sold out to bigger farmers, and so these days, I don’t think there are too many small family farms anymore, and the population has dwindled and the houses have been moved or pushed in because they were too old to live in. And, you know, the, next generation isn’t coming home to farm any longer.
Megan: While I have the tendency to look at Dagmar’s past through rose-colored glasses, watching my grandparents age rid me of any idealism I might have had. They didn’t even have to say it. Grandpa’s hands were buckled and his body tilted. It was clear he’d sweat and stretched to make a living on the hardpacked prairie in open-air tractors and dusty threshing machines.
Since my grandpa started farming, tractors and combines have gotten much, much bigger. These machines cover more ground faster, but they also require less labor.
Tom is one of the few people still farming in the area. He’s a happy Dane from North Dagmar. As the old saying goes, the Danes from North Dagmar are light-hearted, while the Danes from South Dagmar, where I’m from, are serious.
Tom has watched agriculture change in real time.
Tom: We were just talking about this the other day. Yep. How many families that, that were supported by the land that we now farm. And there was, we came up with like nine or 10 families that were, were supported on these farms and, and we’re doing all that now and just to make a living for ourselves.
Megan: 100 years ago, farms used to be 160 acres. Today they have to be at least 5,000 acres to make it work.
Tom: I think the big demise has been the demise and the number of people that can be supported on the land. If there was still a lot of people on the, uh, farming, it still would be going, but it’s just, there’s fewer and fewer people all the time,
Megan: So that all means fewer families in the county, fewer kids in the school and like my friend, Paula, says: fewer characters in the bar.
Paula: And then once that closed, then boy, you just wondered how long it was gonna be before the town was dead completely.
Megan: As we talk, I realize Paula’s had a front row seat to Dagmar’s decline. The bar closing was one nail in the coffin. And she remembers another one – when the spot where everyone went to get their oil changed went up in smoke.
Paula: When the station burned, that was a real hub. Then the locals didn’t have a place to gather in the mornings and talk over the days, events coming up or past or the weather or whatever.
Megan: The deaths of the bar, the service station and the two-room schoolhouse happened from the ‘80s to early 2000s. But one of the last casualties the town suffered happened not that long ago – in 2023. That’s when an uncontrollable fire consumed Nathaneal Church. The church was Dagmar’s first building, built in 1910. A century later, even after all the other institutions went away, that church was still a place where we’d gather.
One of the last times I was there, in the summer of 2019, I recorded a service for my podcast, “Reframing Rural.”
Aaron Rudnigen: Let us pray for the whole people of God in Christ Jesus and for all people according to their needs. Lord please be with our farmers and ranchers as they are spraying their fields and starting to cut hay for the hay season. Please keep them safe, watch over them and let their crops be abundant. Lord in your mercy.
Megan: Paula and I drive to where Nathanael once stood, to pay our respects. It feels like we’re on our way to visit a loved one’s grave.
Megan [on tape]: How does it feel to be back here?
Paula: Uh, boy, I sure have mixed feelings. It just makes me sad all over again. It was such a shock when it happened and it’s just like a death, you know, you mourn ’cause it was such an important part of our lives. But you know, she was a good and faithful servant.
Megan: I see the remnants of another burned down building when I drive into my grandparents’ farmyard.
Russ: The chimney was the only thing left standing. And then it, uh, blew down this way. So there was bricks scattered out this way. See the bricks? I’m just picking up from where the chimney… See, here’s the old chimney right here. See?
Megan: That’s my dad, picking through what remains of his childhood home.
Russ: And there’s the part of the chimney right there.
Megan: I hear frustration in his voice, but I know deep down, he’s grieving. He can never go back inside the house where his parents and three siblings lived, the house his grandfather built. The foundation started crumbling and raccoons had an easy way in. Trespassers had stolen things from the house, so to prevent further insult or injury, the local volunteer fire department burned down the house. Maybe that’s why some people choose to be cremated. They don’t want their body to fade too far from its original form.
Russ: So this is gonna all have to be piled up…It’s not here anymore. It’s kind of sad. Had a lot of memories here growing up and for a long time.
Megan: In a different rural community, another house might be built where my grandparents’ once stood. Here, there’s not enough demand for housing, so their yard remains vacant.
If you look at a graph of the county population, starting in the ‘70s, it’s like a ski slope. 1982 is the top of the mountain and the rest of the years are a blue run heading down to the parking lot. Those quickly cascading years were my childhood.
Maybe that’s why Dagmar feels dead to me –because I was growing up as it was fading away. But after my trip home to talk to the survivors, I wonder if I might be wrong about it all.
Maybe there are still signs of life in old Dagmar.
I can feel it when I introduce Paula to my son.
Paula: Oh my goodness. What a cutie patootie. What do you think? It’s so fun to be able to run. Yes. He was stuck in the car.
Megan: And when I step into the post office, the only open building on Dagmar’s Central Avenue, and check in with the postmaster, Missy Hobbs.
Megan [on tape]: How many post office boxes are I have 21 that are open.
Missy Hobbs: Yeah, you wanna come in? There’s no running water in this post office, so I use the furnace water from my plants. So during the summer it gets kind of tough. I have to bring water from home.
Megan: Ralph Summers, the mailman for the Dagmar ZIP code, rejects the idea that Dagmar is dead.
Ralph Summers: I don’t think we’re dying. I don’t think so. We’re just at a low spot.
Megan: I catch him just as he’s about to begin his route for the day– which is 125 miles long.
I can also feel a small pulse of life when I walk into Volmer, the remaining Lutheran church in town with my mom.
Megan [on tape]: Can we go in the mosquito?
Renny Torgerson: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Megan: Upstairs, we find a hymnal I wrote my name on in sloppy elementary-school handwriting:
Renny: There you are.
Megan [on tape]: Well, at least I wrote it small.
Renny: Yeah, you used to be bigger than this. I thought it was in pen. This looks like pencil.
Megan [on tape]: We should put it in the third row where it belongs.
Megan: It’s the only book in the whole church with a name written on it. Maybe as a little girl, I wanted to be remembered as someone who lived here once. I wanted to have a place in Dagmar’s story.
While I don’t see a future for myself in Dagmar, Paula’s daughter Kim Rudningen did. Kim’s always known she wanted to end up living in Dagmar. She moved away to go to college and then find work, but when the nearby Bakken Oil boomed in the early 2000s, Kim was able to make her move back. She works in environmental compliance for an oil and gas company.
Kim Rudningen: Now I drive to Sydney, uh, about three days a week. And that’s about 90 miles from here one way. So quite a hike.
Megan: But to Kim, those long hours behind the windshield are worth a life in Dagmar.
Kim: I think anytime I’ve thought of home, that’s just where it’s at and it, it’s really more so the feeling. If nothing else, just kind of that feeling of peace when you’re here. And even though there’s a lot fewer people here than there ever were growing up, you still just kind of feel like this is where your roots are, where you’re, where you belong.
Megan: Kim’s on the church council, and the board that makes decisions about the Dagmar Co-op. That’s the town’s general store, which is closed now. Things have been looking bleak for both institutions.
Kim: We lost the church building itself, and then this last summer the store manager decided to move on. And so this, the Dagmar co-op store was still there and as a, a church council member and a dagmar co-op board member, you know,
And there was several of us in that same group where you’re serving the church, but you’re also on the Dagmar co-op and thinking about how do we continue to make sure these things are taken care of? And somebody original, if you will, to the community is making sure that the wrong people don’t take and maybe trash what we kind of cherish.
And so, you know, the church ended up purchasing the store, um, and taking that so that we could keep it going really to pay the expenses and make sure it’s kept up.
Megan: That’s one building that, at least for now, won’t crumble into ruin. Hearing Kim share the efforts being made to keep the town alive, makes me wonder who am I to declare it dead. Dagmar might look different than when I lived there 20 years ago, but it’s still Dagmar. People still call her home, including Kim and her mom, Paula, Doug the town historian, Ralph the mailman and even the badger in my parents’ front yard. Which makes me think back to the song Dagmar local, Mark Miller, sang the day the co-op closed, June 25, 2024 – the day I thought Dagmar died.
[Danish song comes back]
Megan: The song is called “Hun skal leve,” Danish for “she must live.” It’s a birthday song and its lyrics tell of a wish for someone’s life to go on.