Locating the Lost Village of LaFond

Have you ever lost something and searched absolutely everywhere for it, only to find it in the most obvious place? Well, that happened to me, except I was looking for an entire town. Kinda. Let me explain.

Earlier this year, we received a research inquiry from an archaeologist working on a project between Little Falls and Flensburg asking for information on the exact location of the village LaFond, later known as St. Stanislaus. The archaeologist provided its recorded section in Pike Creek Township, Section 29, as well as its probable proximity to a railroad and schoolhouse. After my Vawter article last year, the thought of discovering another ghost town’s location excited me. Just a nice, smooth dive into a fun mystery, right? Wrong!

To begin, I first checked our ‘lost villages’ box in the archives. It contains general ghost town information, then files for ones we have more information on, like Gregory and Elk City. There, I found a map from 2014 showing all the known sites of abandoned villages in Morrison and a list of those with unknown locations. Can you guess where LaFond was? That’s right, on the unknown list. Mocking me. But no matter, there were plenty of other, older maps at my disposal, so I persisted.

My next idea was to dig into the plat books. When researching Vawter, I learned that towns were sometimes still marked on maps even if they no longer existed, so I felt optimistic. I grabbed our oldest atlas, dated 1892, flipped to Pike Creek Township and found nothing. Well, except for a railroad and school in the exact position the archaeologist said they’d be. Whatever, I jumped to the 1923 book and found the same thing—a railroad through the assumed section, a nearby school, yet still no indication of LaFond. 

At this point, the nerves kicked in; resources were getting low, LaFond was seeming more and more like a memory lost to time, and at the same time, I’m running around assisting another researcher in-person—who was honestly more than gracious despite my near hysteria. After working with them, I rushed back to the archives to scour the few maps left. If LaFond wasn’t traceable by 1923, that left me four final plat books.

The last maps LaFond could possibly be on are from 1902 to 1914, in atlases about a quarter of the size of the previous ones. They’re bound differently than those, too, with blank pages between paired maps and the publisher information handwritten or stamped onto the front covers. With the sliver of hope I had left, I flipped to Pike Creek Township in each book: 1902, nothing; 1906, also nothing; 1912, a big pile of nada; finally, 1914, and still nothing in Pike Creek.

Confused but too motivated to quit, I had no other option but to recheck the small plat books—this time scouring every township, every section, every rail line for even a hint of LaFond. I hastily riffled through the maps of the 1912 atlas and accidentally flipped to the final page, which happened to be a county map folded into itself to fit. One small glance at it revealed my prize: there on a railroad, in Section 29 of Pike Creek Township, east of Flensburg and southwest of Little Falls, was LaFond. 

Just like that, the answer to a seemingly unsolvable mystery was right under my nose. A similar map was on the back cover of the 1914 atlas, also showing LaFond in the same location. These books have been utilized by countless researchers over the years, and yet we are still finding new information within them. If I had never double-checked those atlases, I may have come to the same conclusion as the 2014 map, that LaFond was lost for good. Luckily, that didn’t happen; instead I confirmed with the archaeologist that his presumptions of the ghost town’s locale were correct, and got to add a new folder to the “Lost Villages” box. LaFond is no longer lost, and now anyone seeking out Morrison County’s ghost towns will know exactly where it once was.

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By Alesha Ouren

Article first appeared in the Morrison County Historical Society newsletter, Volume 39, Number 2, 2026.