How Medora earned the score

Let’s meet Medora, North Dakota

Come in off Interstate 94 at the Painted Canyon overlook and the ground simply falls away: banded buttes in rust and gray, junipers holding the gullies, bison somewhere below moving like slow furniture. Seven minutes later you are on Third Avenue in Medora, a town platted in 1883 along the Northern Pacific line and named by its founder for his wife.^[1] The whole place is a few walkable blocks pressed between the Little Missouri River and the entrance station of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, at an elevation of 2,270 feet and a population, at the last census, of 121.^[1]

Those 121 residents are the least crowded thing about the town. The nonprofit that operates most of Medora’s commercial core employs more than 90 people full time, brings in over 300 seasonal workers each summer, and fields more than 700 volunteers a year.^[6] The amphitheatre on the edge of town seats more than 2,800, roughly 23 seats for every resident.^[10] On a good July night the cast, crew, ushers, and audience of one musical outnumber the town by an order of magnitude. Medora is not a town with a show in it. It is a show with a town in it, and it has been run that way, deliberately and professionally, for 60 years.

A marquis builds the first act

Medora began as a business plan. In April 1883 a 25-year-old French nobleman, the Marquis de Mores, stepped off the train at a rough Dakota Territory siding and decided to build a meatpacking empire on the open range.^[2] He named the new town for his wife, Medora von Hoffman, the daughter of a New York banker, and spent her family’s money at frontier speed. Within a year he had raised a 35,000 square foot packing plant, three icehouses, corrals, a hotel, a store, and stables.^[2] The scheme was to slaughter cattle where they grazed and ship refrigerated beef east by rail, bypassing the Chicago stockyards entirely.

The stockyards won. Squeezed by the beef trust and his own overreach, the Marquis watched the business fail by 1885, and the plant closed for good in 1886.^[2] What survived is the point of the story. His 26-room summer house still stands on the bluff above town as the Chateau de Mores State Historic Site, the packing plant’s brick chimney still marks the river flat, and the town kept the name of a banker’s daughter who spent two summers there. Medora’s founding industry lasted three years. Its founding instinct, that this valley could sell something to the wider world, never left.

The dude who became the brand

Five months after the Marquis arrived, a skinny 24-year-old New York assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt got off the same rail line to shoot a bison before the species disappeared. He got his bison, and the badlands got him. Roosevelt bought into the Maltese Cross Ranch south of town that fall. Then, on February 14, 1884, his wife and his mother died in the same house within hours of each other, and the grieving young politician came back west to disappear into work. That summer he established the Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri, 35 miles north of Medora, the quiet home ranch where he wrote, grieved, and rebuilt himself.^[4]

The cattle years ended badly, as they did for nearly everyone; the brutal winter of 1886 to 1887 destroyed most of the herds on the northern range. But Roosevelt said for the rest of his life that he would never have become president without his years in North Dakota, and the conservation ethic he carried into the White House was formed watching this specific grassland get grazed, hunted, and nearly used up. The badlands returned the compliment. In 1947 President Truman created Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park around Medora’s south flank, the North Unit followed in 1948, and in 1978 the whole 70,446 acre landscape, including the Elkhorn site, became Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the only US national park named for a person.^[3] The park logged 668,679 recreation visits in 2022 and has run near or above three quarters of a million in its best recent years.^[3] Every one of those visits funnels past, and usually through, a town of 121 people.

Bubble bath money buys the second act

By the mid twentieth century Medora was a fading cow town with famous scenery. The man who changed that was Harold Schafer, a North Dakota salesman who built the Gold Seal Company in Bismarck into a national household goods firm on the strength of Glass Wax, launched in 1945, and later Mr. Bubble, the pink boxed bubble bath that became a fixture of American childhoods.^[5] Schafer loved Medora the way other executives loved golf. In 1962 he bought the Rough Riders Hotel, the 1884 railroad hotel that had taken its name from Roosevelt’s regiment back in 1903, along with the old Ferris Store.^[1]

What followed was less a renovation than a resurrection. In 1963 his crews dismantled the three-story hotel, numbered each board, and rebuilt the structure sound while keeping its 1880s face.^[5] In 1965 the Medora operation of Gold Seal opened to the public, and that same summer the first Medora Musical played the Burning Hills Amphitheatre, an outdoor stage set into the side of a butte west of town.^[5] Schafer kept pouring Gold Seal profits into the town for two decades, hotels, restaurants, attractions, sidewalks, with no realistic path to getting the money back. Then, in 1986, he and his wife Sheila made the move that separates Medora from every other rescued small town in America: they gave it away. The family donated its Medora properties to a new nonprofit, the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, so that no heir, buyer, or bankruptcy could ever unwind the work.^[5]

The foundation that runs the town like a show

Forty years on, that foundation is one of the most unusual economic engines in rural America. The Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation operates the Rough Riders Hotel and other lodging, the gift shops, the Pitchfork Steak Fondue on the bluff above the amphitheatre, the Bully Pulpit Golf Course threaded through the buttes, the Point to Point Park zipline, a Theodore Roosevelt one man show, and the Medora Musical itself. It carries more than 90 full-time employees, over 300 seasonal staff, 700 plus annual volunteers, revenues above $20 million, and a balance sheet of roughly $100 million.^[6] For scale, that is a workforce nearly four times the town’s population, run by a nonprofit whose surpluses cycle straight back into the streets that generate them.

The Musical is the flywheel. It has been staged every summer since 1965, a professional western variety show with live horses, a live band, and a Roosevelt storyline, performed nightly in the 2,800 plus seat Burning Hills Amphitheatre.^[10] It draws more than 110,000 people a season, and over six decades more than 4 million have seen it.^[6] Around it the foundation programs the town like a repertory house: fondue seatings before the show, the Teddy Roosevelt Show at the Old Town Hall Theater in the afternoon, golf in the morning, fireworks on the Fourth. Even the institution’s leadership turns over like an institution rather than a family business. Randy Hatzenbuhler, who joined in 1988 and led the foundation for nearly four decades, handed the role to Clarence Sitter, the longtime finance chief, on April 2, 2025.^[7] No estate sale, no succession drama, no new owner with new ideas. The show simply went on.

What a visit looks like now

A Medora day has a rhythm the foundation has been tuning for decades. Morning belongs to the park: the scenic loop through the South Unit, wild horses on the ridgelines, prairie dog towns working the flats. Midday is the town, which you can cover on foot, the Chateau de Mores tour, the Harold Schafer Heritage Center, the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame, ice cream on Third Avenue. Late afternoon, golfers chase tee shots between buttes at Bully Pulpit while families ride the zipline at Point to Point Park. At suppertime, cooks at the Pitchfork Steak Fondue spear steaks a dozen at a time on actual pitchforks and plunge them into fry pots as the badlands go gold. And at dusk everyone funnels into the same 2,800 seats to watch the Musical against a butte lit by the sunset.^[10]

The math on all this is startling for a town this size. Medora hosts roughly 800,000 visitors a year, according to reporting in The Dickinson Press, which makes it North Dakota’s most visited destination.^[8] That is more than 6,600 visitors for every resident. The foundation model is why the ratio works: one operator coordinates rooms, tickets, dinner seatings, and staffing, so a town of 121 can absorb a crowd that would swamp an unorganized main street.

The library bet

On July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday, Medora opened its third act. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a 96,000 square foot building designed by the architecture firm Snohetta, now sits in the buttes on the edge of town, a roughly $450 million project counting exhibits, campus, and operating endowment.^[9] North Dakota’s legislature seeded it with $50 million in 2019, a Bank of North Dakota line of credit bridged construction, and private donors had pushed the campaign past $286 million by the spring of 2025.^[9]

The projections attached to it are transformative for a seasonal town. Planners expect 150,000 to 185,000 library visitors in the first year, stabilizing around 200,000 annually within five years, and $30 million to $50 million in new economic activity each year.^[8] More important than the raw count is the calendar: the library is a year-round anchor in a town whose signature product has always closed in September. If the badlands winter can be sold, the foundation finally has the building to sell it, and a town that has lived on a 90 day season gets a chance at a 365 day economy.

What a town gains, and risks, when one foundation is the economy

Medora’s Visitor Impact Score is 100, the Destination Leader band, and the pillar grades show why the model works. Brand and Stay both score a perfect 100: sixty years of one consistent story, sold through one booking flow, with lodging, dinner, and the show packaged by a single operator. Anchor scores 98.5 because the core experience is genuinely one of one, a national park at the door and a professional outdoor musical staged by the same institution that turns down your hotel bed. Downtown comes in at 88, a compact core where nearly everything a visitor wants sits within four blocks.

The gains of the single-foundation model are all over those numbers. Nonprofit ownership means profits do not leak out to distant shareholders; they resurface as restored facades, new attractions, and scholarship style wages for 300 seasonal workers who come from across the country. Programming is coordinated instead of competitive, preservation is policy rather than sentiment, and leadership succession is a board decision, not a family crisis. The risks are just as visible. A town that is one balance sheet deep has no diversification; the Web pillar at 80.5 and Return at 80.6 reflect a digital presence and an off-season communication rhythm that still assume the summer show is the only product, and the Curb score of 70 remains provisional until a field visit. There is also the harder question every institutional town must answer: when one organization writes the whole script, the place can drift from town to attraction. Medora’s saving grace is that its show business is not a costume, it is the actual 60 year history of the place.

Why other towns should follow Medora’s lead

The lesson is not the badlands, which cannot be copied, or the bubble bath fortune, which arrives once a century. The lesson is institutional: Medora took a specific, ownable story and built a permanent organization, not just an annual event, to perform it. We saw the same pattern at a different scale when Thomas Dambo’s trolls landed in Detroit Lakes: a distinctive draw matters most when a town commits real structure to it. Most communities market whatever their businesses happen to do. Medora decided what the town would be, staffed it like a theater company, endowed it like a university, and has now added a presidential library as its year-round headliner. A town of 121 hosts 800,000 guests a year because, every summer since 1965, someone made sure the show went on. That is not luck. That is an operating model, and the first step is available to any town: pick your story, then build something permanent enough to keep telling it.