Nearly five months after contractors digging in the yard first struck a grave, archaeologists have lifted seven coffins of human remains out of the lawn at the North Dakota Governor’s Residence in Bismarck, N.D. An empty wooden box of unknown origin came up with them, the state’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in an email to PEOPLE on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026.
The agency said a preliminary analysis of the remains indicated they belong to two women, two men, two teenage boys and one toddler.
What the Dig Turned Up
Crews examined more than 80 anomalies and spots of interest flagged during the investigation before closing out fieldwork on Sept. 14, Brandon Solberg, the OMB’s facilities management director, said. The excavation had begun on Sept. 1.
Searching the grounds is done; the science is not. Archaeologists will now review and catalog each set of remains and every object recovered, work the state expects to stretch into early 2027.
Who the dead were is still an open question. “The remains are unidentified,” according to an account of the state’s findings published Oct. 7.
A Routine Excavation Stopped Cold
Contractors opened the case on May 19, when a dig in the southwest corner of the property, near 4th Street and Boulevard Avenue, produced human remains along with coffin hardware and fragments. Construction stopped, and authorities were notified. Archaeologists with the State Historical Society of North Dakota then swept the area with ground-penetrating radar.
Those first scans suggested the contractors had clipped the edge of something much bigger. Preliminary radar results identified nine more anomalies, pointing to the potential for 10 graves in the work area, the OMB said at the time.
A Cemetery Beneath the Lawn
The explanation sits more than a century back. From 1873 to 1877, in the city’s earliest years, the property served as Bismarck’s first community cemetery. Most of the graves were believed to have been relocated to St. Mary’s and Fairview cemeteries in the 1880s.
That belief has been tested before. A project at the site uncovered 13 burials in 1903, and five more came to light in 1959 — evidence that the 19th-century relocation effort left people behind.
Kara Haff, a spokesperson for the State Historical Society of North Dakota, told The Bismarck Tribune: “They had thought in the 1880s that they had exhumed everybody.”
Haff gave the paper a fuller account of what the record shows about that effort: “There’s an article that says ‘we’ve moved everybody but two, and we expect that work to be done within the next week.’ Well, this has kind of proven otherwise.”
Plans for Reburial Next Spring
The OMB has contracted with a local funeral home to handle the reburial, and Crisis Care Chaplaincy has volunteered to help see that the relocation is carried out respectfully. The governor “wants to ensure the remains are treated with the appropriate care and respect,” a spokesperson for Gov. Kelly Armstrong told the North Dakota Monitor.
Reburial in a local cemetery is expected in the spring of 2027, once the cataloging is complete.
