A Different Kind of Boom

In the oil patch, we have grown accustomed to seeing temporary housing. There are man-camps, campgrounds full of RVs, and apartments have been springing up at record speed to accommodate the population explosion that began several years ago with the onset of the oil boom.

More than sixty years ago, however, there was a different need for temporary housing and another kind of boom was just beginning. It was World War II, or more accurately the end of World War II, that caused the boom – a baby boom. And the boom caused the need.

The war had demanded much of Americans, and many students at Dickinson State Teachers College had met those demands by enlisting in the armed forces and serving their country. After the war finally ended in 1945, the GIs returned home to their wives or sweethearts and resumed the lives they had put on hold. The sudden increase in enrollments at colleges across the nation was matched only by the swift increase in the number of children born. Colleges across the state were not prepared for the influx of veterans and their growing families.

To meet the need, DSTC provided sixteen family housing units exclusively for veterans. This temporary housing allowed them to remain on campus while they finished their educations and provided living quarters for their wives and children. Although the accommodations were modest and all occupants shared common bath and toilet facilities, this addition neatly met the needs of the returning veterans.

The Slope Teacher, a college publication, ran the following on July 26, 1946:

There are two trailers which are the expandable type and eight single trailers. These expandable trailers provide approximately two and on half times the space provided in the single trailers. Altogether, there are eleven trailers, but only ten are used for living quarters. The eleventh trailer…is a utility trailer and is equipped with bathroom and toilet facilities for the occupants of the trailers…. Water and sewer connections will be made as soon as possible for added convenience of the occupants.

These trailers were used for nearly twenty years, although not always for housing. The last one was torn down in 1967 after the completion of the college apartments on the north side of campus.

This 1947 photograph shows temporary housing erected on campus during President Charles E. Scott’s administration for returning World War II veterans and their families. Note the laundry hanging on the clothesline in the center courtyard and the Power Plant beyond.

- Shanna Shervheim, Institutional Archivist