The Town That Took a Railroad Man's Name RoadyGoat
Fargo grew up in 1871 on the flat western bank of the Red River of the North, a townsite first called Centralia before it was renamed for Northern Pacific Railway director William Fargo (yes, the same name behind Wells Fargo). The dead-level country around it isn't an accident: this is the old floor of glacial Lake Agassiz, drained roughly nine thousand years ago, leaving some of the richest farm soil on earth. The Red River is a geographic oddity too, one of the few major rivers in North America that flows north. As for the Coen brothers' 1996 film 'Fargo,' most of its story actually unfolds across the river in Minnesota and around the Twin Cities, not here. A homegrown point of pride: the Roger Maris Museum, a free seventy-foot display case inside West Acres mall honoring the Fargo kid who hit sixty-one home runs in 1961.