When the Far Outliers take road trips in the U.S., one of our hobbies is finding sites on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) that do not have photos in their Wikipedia entries. If and when we find those sites, many of which are well off the beaten track in rural areas, we take photos and upload them to Wikimedia Commons, then link them to the articles about those sites.
One of our unexpected finds on this trip was the small Assyrian Muslim Cemetery and mosque in tiny Ross, Mountrail County, North Dakota, on our way from Minot to Williston, ND. According to a plaque on its exterior, the diminutive mosque was originally built in 1928, fell into disrepair, and was rebuilt in 2004. Most of the cemetery headstones faced east, toward the cemetery gate, but one impressive gravestone set apart from the others faced north. The cemetery was placed on the NRHP in 2018, and stories about it have appeared in the Minot Daily News and the New York Times.
Mountrail County and Williams County (around Williston) are said to be two of the richest counties in North Dakota, thanks to the plethora of oil wells on the large tracts of farmland. The farthest point on this roadtrip was just over the Montana state line at historic Fort Union Trading Post.
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