North Dakota county fastest growing thanks to oil boom
WATFORD CITY, N.D. — First came the roughnecks and other oil field workers, almost all men.
Lured by steady wages as the nation climbed out of the Great Recession, they filled McKenzie County’s few motel rooms, then began sleeping in cars, tents, trailers — anything to hide from the cold wind cutting across the North Dakota prairie. Once empty dirt roads suddenly were clogged with tanker trucks. Crime rates spiked.
Soon everything shifted yet again: The workers’ spouses and children arrived. Classrooms swelled. Apartment buildings cropped up beside oil rigs. And the newcomers made this Northern Plains community their own.
The growth made McKenzie the nation’s fastest-growing county during the past decade, according to the Census Bureau. It swept through like a twisting dust devil, shattering the rural innocence of a region known for inhospitable winters and long summer days perfect for growing crops.
But it also brought youth, diversity and better wages — breathing new life into somnolent towns that had been losing population since the 1930s.
Dana Amon, who grew up in a doublewide trailer on a farm on the edge of the county seat, Watford City, remembers riding her horse across fields now dotted with tracts of modest housing lit up at night by flares from nearby oil wells.
“Our little town just blew up at the seams,” she said.
Since the boom began in 2010, jobs in McKenzie County have come and gone with oil’s changing fortunes. Crude prices peaked last decade at more than $130 a barrel, fell below $40, then rebounded before falling again when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
McKenzie just kept growing. Watford City — perched on a bluff, its skyline defined by a pair of grain elevators — spilled out onto surrounding farmland.
The flat, largely barren landscape of Amon’s childhood now features mile after mile of worker camps, shopping centers, subdivisions, hotels, truck yards and warehouses.
When fights became frequent in bars along Main Street and fatal wrecks commonplace on the highways, people like Amon started to lock their doors at night.
Ten years on, the frenzy has settled. The wariness locals and newcomers held for one another eased. Along the way, lives got stitched together through school events, church services and along the sidelines of youth football games.
“I tell the locals, ‘If you guys kick me out, I’m not leaving. It’s my town,”’ said Yolanda Rojas, a Tucson, Arizona, native who followed her husband to McKenzie County with their five children a year after he got a job in the oil fields.
From 2010 to 2014, the amount of crude produced in the county grew 1,800%. By the end of the decade, census figures show, its population more than doubled, to 14,704 residents.
Rojas and her husband, Ruben Vega, saved enough money to open a Mexican restaurant in March 2020 — just as the pandemic arrived. The business was teetering on failure when Rojas reached out to the community on social media.
People in Watford City rallied to help, regularly ordering takeout to keep the family afloat.
Many of the customers were Hispanic and unknown to Rojas. Only when the census data came out did she learn that the number of Hispanics increased tenfold over the decade, a stark cultural shift for a community long dominated by farmers of northern European descent.
Hispanics now make up about 10% of the population — a share roughly equal to American Indians in the county, which includes part of the Fort Berthold Reservation.