The finest building in the village is the white, tall-steepled Lutheran church, built in 1895 near the town of Horace. In the old days, women sat on the beautiful carved pews to the left and men sat on the right. Sermons are still heard occasionally from the raised pulpit, and weddings are held year-round. Observant visitors will note that some collections perhaps lack the rigorous scholarship that trained historians would provide. The Bonanzaville staff makes no apologies.
Volunteers run the show here, and they want to make it interesting.
Indeed they do. Some visitors may feel like settlers in the North Dakota countryside a century ago, trying to find their way without signposts. Look high and low, and you'll glimpse everything from a chariot built for a country doctor so he could make quick runs to his patients during the 1918 flu epidemic, to a huge train-track snowplow, to a butter churn once powered by a dog on a treadmill. Open daily Memorial Day weekend-Oct. The information in this article was last verified in November 1996.