Crews have pulled seven coffins carrying human remains from the lawn of the North Dakota Governor’s Residence in Bismarck, N.D., turning up an empty wooden box of unknown origin alongside them. The state’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) laid out those findings in an email to PEOPLE on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. The recovery closes out a dig that began nearly five months after contractors working in the yard first struck a grave.
Two women, two men, two teenage boys and one toddler make up the group, according to a preliminary analysis of the remains the agency described.
What the Dig Turned Up
Brandon Solberg, the OMB’s facilities management director, said crews worked through more than 80 anomalies and spots of interest that the investigation had flagged, then shut down fieldwork on Sept. 14. The excavation had opened on Sept. 1.
Digging may be over, but the science continues. Archaeologists are set to review and catalog each set of remains and every object pulled from the ground, a job the state expects to stretch into early 2027. “The remains are unidentified,” according to an account of the state’s findings published Oct. 7, with the preliminary analysis establishing only the makeup of the group.
A Routine Excavation Stopped Cold
It started on May 19. Contractors digging the southwest corner of the property, near 4th Street and Boulevard Avenue, hit human remains mixed with coffin hardware and fragments, and construction stopped. Once authorities were notified, archaeologists with the State Historical Society of North Dakota swept the area with ground-penetrating radar.
What the contractors hit, those first scans suggested, was only the edge of something bigger. The preliminary radar results turned up nine more anomalies. That raised the possibility of 10 graves within the work area, the OMB said at the time.
A Cemetery Beneath the Lawn
The answer sits more than a century back. In the city’s earliest years, the property did duty as Bismarck’s first community cemetery, from 1873 to 1877. In the 1880s, work crews were believed to have relocated the bulk of those graves, moving them out to St. Mary’s and Fairview cemeteries.
Earlier work on the site has already cast doubt on that assumption. A project there turned up 13 burials in 1903, and another five surfaced in 1959 — evidence that the 19th-century relocation effort left people behind.
“They had thought in the 1880s that they had exhumed everybody,” Kara Haff, a spokesperson for the State Historical Society of North Dakota, told The Bismarck Tribune. She gave the paper a fuller picture of how confident the 1880s crews were: “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
A local funeral home is under contract with the OMB to handle the reburial, and Crisis Care Chaplaincy has volunteered to help make sure the relocation is done respectfully. Gov. Kelly Armstrong “wants to ensure the remains are treated with the appropriate care and respect,” a spokesperson for the governor told the North Dakota Monitor.
Reburial in a local cemetery is expected in the spring of 2027, after the cataloging wraps up.
