A model pumpjack and digital sign welcome visitors to Tioga, North Dakota, on March 11, 2026. (Photo by Jacob Orledge/North Dakota Monitor)
TIOGA, N.D. (North Dakota Monitor) – Dirt roads. No sewer. No running water. Tioga was a town of 456 people built along a railroad, with agriculture serving as the economic lifeblood for hardy homesteaders who had settled the area.
The community’s fortunes changed in the early morning hours of April 4, 1951. The Clarence Iverson well, surrounded by deep drifts of snow from recent blizzards, struck oil a few miles south of Tioga.
That discovery touched off 75 years of oil exploration in North Dakota and started an industry that now accounts for more than half of all taxes collected in the state.
Tioga, locally considered the oil capital of North Dakota, is no longer at the heart of the state’s oil and gas exploration. But it remains a microcosm of the state’s experience with a commodity-based economy. The town has experienced its peaks and valleys, watching thousands of people flood its streets during boom cycles and struggling to weather the storm when the activity goes bust.
Even so, many of the city’s prominent voices said it’s all worth it. Growth and development bring challenges. But without oil, the town’s former lawmaker David Rust said, Tioga would be worse off.
“It’s a real blessing,” said Rust, who served as superintendent of the school district from 1980 to 2008.
The tax revenues, the economic growth, the population of 2,000, all of it can be traced back to that moment 75 years ago when liquid gold began flowing from the ground. One of the first jobs created was for Carl Frisinger, now 96, believed to be the last surviving member of the crew that drilled the well.
The second-generation rancher was working on the railroad that ran through Tioga at the time. He gave that up to join the crew of the drilling rig for 95 cents an hour. He was part of a three-shift rotation working around the clock, and was present when they hit oil, but quickly discovered how difficult working in the oil field could be.
“Oh, blood and guts, boy. You did your job or you’d get run over,” said Frisinger, who ranched and farmed a few miles east of the well site all his life until he entered Tioga’s Long Term Care center four years ago. “It was hard work, but it was good pay.”
The community has changed drastically since 1951, and Frisinger lived in the area for all of it. Tioga is “bigger and better” now, he said. But before the latest boom in the late 2000s, Frisinger knew just about everybody in the community. He misses those days.
Tim Joyce, owner of the town’s pharmacy since 1987, grew up in town during the 1950s. He remembers members of older generations telling him the biggest change ushered in by the discovery of oil was the money it brought to an area predominantly populated by small farm families just getting by.
Later, after Joyce purchased the pharmacy, he experienced an even larger boom cycle in the 2010s as a business owner.
“It was wonderful to have all the people that came here from all over the country,” Joyce said.
Glenda Lovdahl moved to Tioga in 2000 and has watched the rapid population growth, and the drastic change in the town’s infrastructure. She thinks it has changed the town’s culture and ethnic diversity for the better. A town that was largely descended from Norwegian and German immigrants for so long is becoming more accepting of a much broader variety of backgrounds, she said.
“It has improved hotels, apartments, acceptance within our school district, children growing up with different ethnicities. And those are all good things,” Lovdahl said.
But not everyone has been thrilled with the changes in the community.
“There’s a certain faction that always want to keep it exactly the same,” she said.
Brodie Odegaard, principal of Tioga High School and a lifelong resident of the city, has observed the changes in culture firsthand.
“We didn’t know from day to day what our enrollment would be as a school district, let alone in a classroom,” Odegaard said.
School officials never knew if they would have to buy more desks, books and materials. They added English as a second language courses. Students moved in and out of the district every day.
“Having grown up in Tioga as a child of the oil field for my whole life, I didn’t understand how mobile the oil industry was, how much people chased the drilling,” Odegaard said.
Many newcomers from the Bakken boom have settled in town and started families, leading to a significant growth of the student population, which stood at 507 in early March. It’s a source of excitement for many in the community.
“Your school, in most cases, is the heart of your community,” Odegaard said. “Unfortunately we’ve got some smaller communities in our area that when their school is closed, basically their town is closed.”
Odegaard said the community’s experience with the ups and downs of an economy reliant on oil has taught people to plan and budget conservatively.
Rust said the 1980s and 1990s were a constant cycle of cost-cutting because oil exploration had tapered off in the area.
“We never had enough money to really make ends meet,” Rust said.
He retired as superintendent in 2008, just before the latest wave of tremendous growth. Rust jokes that if he had still been in his role, the school board would have “had to send me for shock treatment to readjust my thinking. Because as a superintendent, I got into such a groove of cutting all of the time that I didn’t know anything else.”
The community, like many in rural America, was exporting its K-12 graduates. Students graduated and moved away because they couldn’t find a job locally. The situation cascaded as the student population slowly decreased to under 300 in the 2000s.
By the early 2000s, the Tioga school district was forced to close one of its two elementary schools and discussed consolidating with a neighboring school district, Rust said.
“It was pretty grim, and it looked like it was going to get grimmer,” he said.
That trend has reversed itself. Nathan Germundson, co-owner of the local hardware store who served as city commission president during the Bakken boom, said the oil field’s resurgence brought good-paying jobs to the area. That brought an influx of outsiders, but also local graduates who had moved away.
“People kind of started coming back slowly and a lot of people my age have moved back here and made families,” Germundson said.
Germundson has lived in Tioga his entire life aside from a brief sojourn to get a bachelor’s degree. He’s not sure that would be the case if the oil industry had not revitalized the area.
“We’ve had a lot of great people that have come to Tioga that are now generational, that really would have had no reason to come here. But they’ve made Tioga their home. They’ve made Tioga what it is. Yeah, absolutely, we’re better off,” said Germundson, whose wife joined the community to fill a teaching position.
One reason people are starting families in the area is the drastic improvements to the city’s quality of life. Cities like Tioga began receiving a share of oil and gas tax revenues in 2013 due to legislative changes to how the money is distributed. The city of Tioga has received more than $76 million from oil and gas taxes since then, averaging $6 million a year.
Those revenues have allowed the community to upgrade infrastructure like roads, construct a multi-million dollar community center, add walking paths and a host of other changes. The school district’s share has resulted in multiple building expansions and renovations.
Economic reliance on oil and gas has created challenges for communities like Tioga. Truck traffic, economic slowdowns out of the city’s control, cultural shifts in the community are only some of the issues that still generate conflict and debate. Nor is it always easy for farmers in the ranchers in the area, who may not live in city limits but are an integral part of its life.
“Companies are just big, think they’re bigger and better than the farmer, than the rancher, than the landowner,” Frisinger said. “We have a lot of trouble with pipelines leaking.”
One of the biggest onshore oil spills in U.S. history was discovered northeast of Tioga in 2013. A pipeline leaked more than 800,000 gallons of oil, leading to a five-year, $93 million cleanup of farmland.
There is natural conflict between agriculture and the oil industry. Yet those are now the twin pillars of economy and life in western North Dakota cities like Tioga. It’s not only a net benefit, according to most, it’s become part of the fabric of life in the area.
“It really is a boon to our community, and I know there are some problems, there’s some growing pains. But the end result is better, far better than what could have been,” Rust said.
Comments