Bonanzaville is not a preserved town. It is a constructed one, assembled building by building from across the region. Each structure was selected for a specific story it could tell about life on the Northern Plains. The prairie church speaks to the faith communities that anchored settlers. The general store captures the economics of small-town commerce. The schoolhouse recalls the one-room education system that served farming families spread across vast distances. The drug store, fire station, and law enforcement museum round out the civic picture. Fargo's first house -- relocated here from its original site -- anchors the collection in the specific history of the Fargo-Moorhead area. Newer purpose-built structures house an aircraft museum and an automobile museum, extending the story of Northern Plains transportation from ox carts to aviation. The whole complex sits just off Interstate 94 at Exit 343, about a mile west of Fargo.

The Telephone Pioneers Museum may be the most engaging exhibit on the grounds. Housed in a former hardware store donated by Oscar Loken of Tower City, the building was converted by US WEST Telephone Pioneers into a working museum of telecommunications history. Receivers, switching equipment, glass and porcelain line insulators, and cable removed from Fargo in 1978 fill the displays. The equipment traces the local service history of Northwestern Bell Telephone Company through the region. What sets the museum apart from static displays elsewhere is that the Telephone Pioneers maintain the equipment in working order. Visitors can actually place calls from one building to another across the village, hearing the clicks and tones of mechanical switching gear doing its work. In an age of invisible wireless signals, there is something deeply satisfying about watching a physical connection being made.

The complex is open from May through September, though event venues operate year-round. The highlight of Bonanzaville's calendar is the annual Pioneer Days celebration, held the third weekend of August -- the largest and longest-running annual event in the Fargo-Moorhead area. The festival brings the reconstructed village to life with demonstrations, performances, and the particular energy of a community celebrating its own history. Other popular events include the July 4 Celebration, Ghost Tours, Paranormal Investigations, and Christmas on the Prairie. The ghost tours draw on the fact that buildings relocated from their original sites carry stories of the people who lived and worked in them -- some of those stories, apparently, not entirely finished. In 2019, the television show Antiques Roadshow filmed at Bonanzaville, bringing national attention to a museum that had been quietly assembling the material culture of the Northern Plains for decades.

Beyond the village buildings, Bonanzaville's collections span the full breadth of Northern Plains life. Horse-drawn vehicles trace the era before internal combustion. Firefighting vehicles and equipment document the particular dangers of prairie communities built largely of wood. Medical and dental equipment tells its own uncomfortable story of frontier healthcare. A newspaper printing press recalls the small-town papers that knit communities together. An exhibit on the Jewish experience in North Dakota, opened in 2017, explores an often-overlooked chapter of settlement history. In 2019, the North Dakota State University Fargo History Project added an exhibit on the Spanish-American War. With several hundred thousand artifacts in total, the collections go far deeper than any single visit can absorb -- which may be exactly the point for a museum dedicated to the proposition that ordinary lives on the Northern Plains are worth remembering in extraordinary detail.