Cool Finds

Construction Work on the North Dakota Governor’s Residence Accidentally Unearthed Seven Coffins Dating Back to the State’s Early Settlement

The cemetery site was established in 1872, when the state capital Bismarck was a small frontier community called Edwinton. Most, but not all, of its gravesites were exhumed five years later to make way for a railroad

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

October 15, 2026 8:00 a.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of seven individuals—two women, two men, two teenage boys and one toddler—near the North Dakota governor’s residence in Bismarck, the state capital.

Construction workers initially discovered human remains and coffin fragments on the southwest corner of the property on May 19, per the Bismarck Tribune’s Grant Coursey. They were working on a $2.35 million project to upgrade the security fences and driveway at the residence, which is located on the grounds of the State Capitol complex.

Archaeologists with the State Historical Society of North Dakota were called in to investigate. They used ground-penetrating radar to explore the area, a process that revealed more than 80 anomalies, KFYR’s Atticus Pead reports.

During a two-week excavation in early September, archaeologists unearthed an empty wooden box and the remains of seven people. They are now studying and documenting the remains, a process that’s expected to continue into 2027.

“It’s going to take a while now to do the research and analysis,” Brandon Solberg, facilities management director for the North Dakota Office of Management and Budget, tells the North Dakota Monitor’s Michael Achterling. Solberg adds that the state will attempt to determine basic information about the remains but has no plans to conduct DNA testing.

In June, Mike Nowatzki, a spokesman for Governor Kelly Armstrong, told the North Dakota Monitor in an email that the governor “wants to ensure the remains are treated with the appropriate care and respect.” The state is partnering with a local funeral home and a nonprofit chaplain group to help rebury the remains by next spring.

The bodies were found in an area that served as the settlement’s first cemetery, founded in 1872, when Bismarck was still a small riverside community known as Edwinton. The burial ground didn’t have an official name—it was known simply as “the graveyard on the hill,” per the New York Times’ Christine Hauser.

“It was far out of town,” Lindsay K. Meidinger, the deputy archivist at the North Dakota State Archives, tells the Times.

In 1877, the property was sold to make way for a railroad. Most of the individuals buried in the graveyard were exhumed and reburied at other Bismarck cemeteries. However, it appears some remains were left behind.

This is not the first time human remains have turned up in Bismarck as the city has developed. In 1903, at least 13 bodies emerged while the city installed a trolley line near the old cemetery. And in the summer of 1959, at least five sets of remains were discovered during the construction of an earlier governor’s residence.

However, crews didn’t find any human remains while they were building the current governor’s residence between 2016 and 2018, so “there was no reason to believe additional remains were present in the area,” Joe Morrissette, director of the North Dakota Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement shared with the North Dakota Monitor in August.

“They had thought in the 1880s that they had exhumed everybody,” Kara Haff, a spokeswoman for the State Historical Society, tells the Bismarck Tribune. “There’s an article that says, ‘We’ve moved everybody but two, and we expect that work to be done within the next week.’ Well, this has kind of proven otherwise.”

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.