Cummings is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Traill County,

North Dakota North Dakota ( ) is a U.S. state in the Upper Midwest, named after the indigenous Dakota people, Dakota and Sioux peoples. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to the north and by the U.S. states of Minneso ...

, United States.

Geography

Cummings is situated directly between Interstate 29 and U.S. Route 81 and is connected to those two highways by North Dakota State Highway 200. Cummings is located several miles north of the city of Hillsboro.

History

A post office was established at Cummings in 1881. The community was named for Henry Cumings, a Great Northern Railway worker, whose name was misspelled so often as Cummings that the

Post Office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letter (message), letters and parcel (package), parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post o ...

made the change official in 1922. It is today largely a farming community, as is the rest of the county. In all of Cummings' history one of their best-known residents was William J. Burnett (born August 14, 1854), who served two terms as a representative for the eighth district in the state senate. In addition to his work in the state senate, Burnett was an advocate for the development of the Farmers' Elevator. His work on behalf of the town resulted in both population and commercial growth in the late 19th century. As of 1910, Cummings had a schoolhouse, grain elevators, general stores, and churches. In the 1940s and 1950s there were several businesses. These included the post office, a grocery store, a bank, a hardware store, a blacksmith, two grain elevators, several potato houses, the Farmer’s Union oil tanks, and the Great Northern Railway depot. There were also Ervin #3 school (1st through 8th grades) and a city hall. The Farmers' Elevator burned to the ground on December 31, 1959 – January 1, 1960. The blacksmith building burned in February of that year. The school was demolished in 1996. The Great Northern depot, which included living quarters for the agent and his family, was located west of the tracks. Joseph Notch was the agent/telegrapher from the early 1930s until his death in 1962. The depot was twice threatened by fire. Once, when burning embers from the Farmers' Elevator fire landed on its roof, several farmers from around Cummings came to the rescue with grain trucks to evacuate the agent and his family. Prior to this, a hot box from a railroad car had ignited the dry prairie grass. The agent and his family, using potato sacks soaked in precious water, managed to get the fire out just before it reached the depot and garage. The depot was sold and removed shortly after 1962, being purchased and renovated into a home. , it is still located a few miles west of Cummings."The Cummings Schools and Village", Published 2008, Page 47

Transportation

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’s

Empire Builder The ''Empire Builder'' is a daily long-distance passenger train operated by Amtrak between Chicago and either Seattle or Portland via two sections west of Spokane. Introduced in 1929, it was the flagship passenger train of the Great North ...

, which operates between

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

/ Portland and

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, passes through the town on

BNSF BNSF Railway is the largest freight railroad in the United States. One of six North American Class I railroads, BNSF has 36,000 employees, of track in 28 states, and over 8,000 locomotives. It has three transcontinental routes that provide ...

tracks, but makes no stop. The nearest station is located in Grand Forks, to the north.

References

{{authority control Unincorporated communities in Traill County, North Dakota Unincorporated communities in North Dakota Populated places established in 1881 1881 establishments in Dakota Territory