Glen Ullin, ND

Glen Ullin is a Morton County city founded along the Northern Pacific Railway in 1883. The 2020 census counted 732 residents. Its name combines “glen,” a Scottish Gaelic word for valley, with “Ullin,” borrowed from Thomas Campbell’s poem “Lord Ullin’s Daughter.” That origin story fits the town’s setting: a small place shaped by a rail route crossing the valley and the roads that now carry traffic through the western North Dakota landscape. The railroad is gone from the daily schedule, but its alignment still gives the city its original shape.

Glen Ullin Public School gives the city a K–12 center on the south side, near the bypass. The school’s history includes a 1966 high-school building and later athletic cooperation with Hebron. The Bearcat name followed an earlier Rattlers identity, another little piece of how school life carries local memory. Glen Ullin is part of the Bismarck–Mandan metropolitan area, but its own scale is easy to see in the school, the railroad history, and the valley town streets.